


Mother!

by mysterycultist



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Character Development, F/M, It’s a reverse Sleepless in Seattle but with guns, Slow Burn, serious robots fiction, they fuck!, undercover at a party episode
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-02-26 16:19:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 39,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18720631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysterycultist/pseuds/mysterycultist
Summary: Kara and Connor cross paths a few hours before he’s supposed to kill her, and meeting him gives Kara new ideas of what she could be. She gives him a new insight into Cyberlife androids.She isn't sure she wants to be a mother.He can’t let it go.





	1. Missed Connections

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _My sadness was never mortal,_
> 
> _it's reborn every morning._
> 
> -Adélia Prado 
> 
> _You flicker. I cannot touch you._
> 
> _I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns._
> 
> -Sylvia Plath 
> 
> _Who has not asked himself at some time or another: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?_
> 
> -Clarice Lispector

_Kara! Kara!_ **_Kara!_ ** 

**_Kara!_ ** 

 

* * *

 

_November_ _5_ _, 11:08 PM_  

“Kara.” 

The RK800 frowns at you. 

Here is the information his scan has turned up: 

_MODEL AX400_  

_CARETAKER, “KARA”_  

_Owner: Todd Williams_  

You have not been reported missing, deviant, or anything else. You know because you would have learned this in your last self-scan .5 seconds ago. 

Neither has Todd. 

RK800 looks down at Alice. Frown. 

“Do you need help?” 

Facial scanning is not one of your features, but when you look up his model number online you find the news reports on a police-assist android that’s recently been deployed.   

That’s fine. 

You smile. That’s the signature feature of your model, your quick-bond skills. You’re in good working order and friendliness is always at highest priority—See, RK800? 

“My owner is out of town. His trip got extended, so he asked me to bring Alice to meet him in Columbus. Unfortunately, our flight was canceled.” 

Rain comes down harder. RK800, shielding his head with a magazine slab, nods and shuffles closer to you, under the awning of the drug store. 

Your brow furrows, your smile saddens. “And I wasn’t given any money for the trip, it was pre-paid. I can’t get a hold of my owner. I…” 

It’s okay that you’re blinking yellow. It would be unnatural if you weren’t. Alice burrows into you, face in your stomach. You fold arms over her—exactly as your programming recommends, unthinking. 

“Please,” you say. “I don’t know what to do.” 

He nods. He’s looking away from you now, into the street—Reading storefronts, you realize. He’s prioritizing another task. 

“I can transfer some funds,” he says, and only then do you realize he’s holding his arm out to you. You’re shocked he doesn’t need authorization for that. Does he have auto-bribing capabilities? You’re shocked you flew under his radar so easily. 

They did say he was a detective _prototype._  

“Thank you,” you say. “I just want to get her warm, and dry, and safe.” 

You do, you think, flashing orange. You  _do._  

She shivers in your arms and you feel yourself pulling her in tighter, which is not what programming recommends—You’re supposed to keep a light touch, maintain an amount of distance, give her opportunity to break away. You don’t want her to break away, though. You’re not sure what would happen if she did. 

You were made for this. Why are you so scared? Why are you scared? 

You reach out and set your wrist against his jacket sleeve. He looks away from the skyline, eye-to-eye, just long enough to connect. 

The money hits your account. You accept. 

“There’s a motel down the street,” RK800 says, and then he’s gone, following one of the neon signs into the rain. 

Then you’re gone, too. Objective complete. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 6:11 PM_  

You swirl the drink in your glass one last time before you set it down on the tablecloth and turn to answer. You’re wearing a smile. You’re wearing a dinner jacket with no serial number on the breast. 

She’s still smiling when you falter, just for a second. 

Kara is wearing a pale gold evening dress. It drapes over her in a way that encourages you to imagine she’s relaxed, game, enjoying the feel of the wine in her hand. It’s good costuming; if you were just to drape a coat over her you’d see the effect disappear. You’d see her waiting, watching. 

She’s also really beautiful. 

You’re sure you look like yourself, but you aren’t a familiar face. Except to her. 

She extends her hand. “I’m Kara.” 

You take it and grasp. “Connor.” And you let go. 

The temperature of her smile seems to change as she tilts her head ever so slightly. 

 

* * *

 

_November 6, 10:06 AM_  

“File report: AX400, ‘Kara,’ spotted downtown on Camden Avenue outside the 24 convenience store, transporting an unregistered YK500 with LED removed. Owner Todd Williams, likely a blackmarket sale in progress. Probably now at the Eastern Market Motel. Both androids appear stable.” 

That’s why you didn’t bother with it yourself: you had a more important mission. Still, providing the AX400 with a motel room has likely kept them in a stable location and given you time to get back to the station and file your report. You don’t have access to police systems remotely, as you are not government property.  

Now that you have a desk, though, you can access them manually. 

Slowly, your new partner, Hank, lifts his face from his hand. The glow of his computer monitor continues to settle into his wrinkles even as his cheek is un-squished. “Did you just _file a report?_ ” 

“Yes.” He has just shown you your desk and invited you to read the database, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity. 

Hank shakes his head, unblinking. “So how long you been sitting on this one?” 

“Ten hours.” 

Hank blinks. Then, he slams his hands on his desk and scrapes his chair back, stands up. “Fuck me, then! Let’s go!” 

“Lieutenant, we’re supposed to be tracking deviants. My assessment was that these two were stable, operating under orders from a human criminal. Our objective is to track  _deviants,_ not stolen property. We should leave this to someone else.” 

Hank’s shoving his coat on. “ _In progress_ is not the kind of crime you sit on for ten hours.” 

You consider arguing with him, but decide that it’s worthwhile to stay silent and foster goodwill with your partner. 

You’re getting up to follow him when an officer comes in from another room holding a holopad above his head with intent. “Wait, Hank, homicide.” 

Hank takes the pad from him, reads it over. He purses his lips, nods his head, hands it back. “Thanks, I’m on it.”  

He sneers at you. “ _Todd Williams_  is dead. They’re ‘stable,’ huh?” 

Oh. Fuck. 

 

* * *

 

_November 6, 7:30 PM_  

You’re laying a new blanket down on Alice’s bed when she screams. You whirl; you left the gun on the dresser a few feet away. 

You knew this was a bad boat. 

There’s a man in the doorway who looks just like Ralph, but less immediately insane. 

He’s holding his hands up in front of him. He’s saying _I’m a friend,_ repeatedly. Alice is balled up in the corner, watching you and waiting.  

You lunge for the gun, then wait. 

He lowers his hands. 

“You know that other androids live here,” he says. 

You nod. 

“Okay,” he says. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to know how you got here.” 

 

* * *

 

_November 5, 11:40 AM_  

He comes back. 

You knew he would. You’re Kara: you were made to care, clean, and keep safe, and even though that classes you among the lower-end menial androids offered by Cyberlife, it does require you to be capable of some critical thinking. The only people who think it doesn’t must not have to worry about little girls much. They’re fragile creatures. They’re very delicate, and more precious than people appreciate. 

You have only been doing it for about eight hours, but even in that time you’ve come to appreciate that the challenges are more than your programming ever could have anticipated. 

It is, however, still what you were made for, so you have some idea what you’re doing. 

You didn’t know when they’d find Todd, but you had to take a chance on the motel—it was too good to walk away from. You spent the whole night there, lying on your side with Aice in your arms, accessing the internet through your internal interface and trying to work up the nerve to hack a police scanner, which you know is way out of your skillset but would help so much.  

You also watch news coverage from a few months ago on a deviant attack that RK800 was present for. You wait until you’re sure Alice is out cold—She snores; you didn’t know that—and you stream it on the room’s TV.  

Your memory doesn’t go back far—about 8 hours, that keeps cycling back into your thoughts—but you’re pre-programmed with knowledge of other Cyberlife android models and their capabilities, for the convenience of your owner. RK-class are experimental and not available for commercial sale, so your knowledge ends there. The RK who gave you money today caught your attention for a few reasons, and you find yourself wondering how much you’re able to modify yourself—to learn, essentially, but in a way that goes way beyond your design parameters. 

If you could pick up some of his skillset, Alice would have a leg up, that’s for sure. That idea keeps bouncing back, too: how urgent it is that you expand your programming. Right now, Alice has much more experience living than you do, and she’s human, and you feel dwarfed next to her. That isn’t healthy for her. You can’t keep looking to her for guidance. You need to be the one she can look up to. 

What are you, anyway, if you can’t even help your little girl? 

You have to cover your mouth to keep from gasping when he pulls the gun and shoots that PL600–Is he allowed to do that?  

It seems like he’s allowed to do whatever he wants. 

He turns his back on the little girl as she’s crying on the tile, even though just the sight sends you into distress. But you suppose it isn’t  _his_ job. That’s what something like you, or Daniel, are for. 

You feel a little unbalanced after that. 

Children need at least nine hours of sleep a night to thrive, but you can only let Alice have five before the risk feels too great. RK800 seems to be on some deviant task force, and that makes you feel confident until you realize it doesn’t make you feel confident at all.  

Whether or not he let you go, he noticed.  

You decide to go to the safe house that custodian android told you about, but it’s still too early to be on the street—especially in these same clothes, especially an AX400  bringing her little girl into the rain like this while it’s still dark, no buses running—if you were a human mother, it’d be none of their business. They’d say oh, what a bad mother, and go on with their day. 

So you find a squat, have a makeover, and by the time it’s safe to leave you’re being held hostage. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 6:19 PM_  

Your LED is covered by an opaque sticker and makeup; it was done easily in a backroom of the police station while Hank paced, hands on his waist, back and forth and asked you your opinions on things. Of course, you don’t have any, but it wasn’t hard to pick something. The makeup artist snorted and asked if you were serious when you said that Keanu Reeves was definitely the best actor of all time, and Hank jumped in to ask what was wrong with Keanu. You were pleased, because you’d guessed that this was the answer Hank would give, and the three of you engaged in conversation for a few minutes. 

But then Hank crossed his arms and looked down at you, grimacing. “That’s all good, Connor, but you don’t say Keanu. You say James Dean or Buster Keaton.” 

You didn’t understand; he gave your cheek a firm pat and began pacing again. “No one looks like that and picks Keanu. And your favorite album is  _The Stranger._ ” 

You’d thought about asking him if he wanted to administer a Turing test, but you didn’t because it occurred to you that the joke might not land, and you didn’t want to think about that. 

Her LED is gone. You wonder what it would tell you if it was there. 

 

* * *

 

_November 6, 10:41 AM_  

You don’t have access to the police scanner yet, so he catches you by surprise. 

You’re holding the gun on Ralph when the knock comes. You hold it on him as he steps to the boarded window, looks out. He turns back to you. 

“It’s a gentleman caller,” he absolutely whispers. 

 

* * *

 

_November 6, 10:44 AM_  

You grab the chainlink fence and two irrational thoughts hit your mind at once. 

One: You’re not going to get her. 

Two: She has the answers you’re looking for. 

You’re going to keep looking for her. 


	2. Jericho, Baby!

_November 6, 10:10 PM_  

You step into the hall and shut the door gently behind you. 

“She’s sleeping,” you tell Simon. 

He smiles and nods. There’s something off about it, but you’re not sure. “I wanted to ask if you need anything. We have blood and parts now.” 

“So it worked?” 

He nods again. His arms are crossed tightly over his chest, and he’s dressed so warmly that it reminds you to worry about finding more blankets for Alice. There is also something so patient and knowing in his expression now that you feel a sense of relief, because you feel compelled to defer responsibility to him like a human, until you remind yourself that he isn’t. 

“If she’s asleep, you could come down for a minute. There’s a lot of us here. And the mood’s improved a little, now.” 

“I need to be here if she wakes up.” 

He smiles, nods. “But for just a minute?” 

You exhale, hard. Just a minute... 

\--- 

_November 9, 6:44 PM_  

“That’s where I’m from.” She points with her free hand to where Corktown lays on the skyline, beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass. You squint and lean in, unnecessarily. She takes your glass out of your hand and tips the cocktail back to splash against her lips, laughing when she’s done. You meet her eye, you smile back. It’s what’s called a knowing smile. 

You wonder how many people here are waiting for you to reveal that she’s an android. At first, you though she’d miscalculated, but now you think she was counting on this—the festival atmosphere and you, this mysterious man at her hip, and the appearance of a party trick to hide this AX400 in plain sight. 

“Where are you from?” 

You’re from the island off the coast, like she is. You and Hank had agreed that you were from out of town, Cleveland, but it’s already crossed your mind that Cleveland’s probably much more familiar to some of the people here than any cursory research you’ve conducted could’ve made you, so you point to Midtown, where Hank lives. 

Her eyebrow arcs. “Oh, Midtown?” 

You wonder what he’s thinking on the other side of the wire you’re wearing. 

\---- 

_November 6, 10:15 PM_  

“That’s Markus.” 

You’re on a balcony in the ship’s hold—there are a few fires up here, and dozens below, in barrels, trashcans, whatever else they could find. You thought you would’ve been the only one to do it, because you have Alice, but you’re pleased by how bright and safe it makes the place feel. 

Down there is where most of the androids seem to be, laid out on the floor or buzzing around with wires and parts in their hands. One of them, a black man in a long, tattered coat, is central: he’s standing on a crate, passing out packets of blood.  

You lean over the rail to try and get a read on him. He’s just out of range. 

“Is he your leader?” 

Simon rests his arms on the rail next to you. “I don’t know,” he says lightly. 

“Well,” you say. You step up onto the lowest rail, lean farther out. “If he might be your leader, what’s he leading you to? I mean, do you have an objective?” 

“He thinks we should campaign for legal rights. I don’t know. I really think his efforts would be put to better use just getting us to improve conditions on Jericho.” 

Markus seems to spot something—for a second, you think it’s you, but it’s something below you—and he takes a load of blood packs in his arms and strides forward. 

In range: 

_RK200_ _#684 842 971_  

You weren’t expecting that. 

He startles; a blue blood packet drops to the floor, and he looks up. 

One of his eyes is green. 

“Do you know where he came from?” You try to keep your tone even. He shouldn’t have noticed you; you were only performing a routine ID-handshake. It’s barely routine, it’s sub-routine. It’s tears in the rain, on a processing level. 

Simon says, “I don’t know. If you’re asking about his model, all I know is that he’s a prototype. He was in pretty rough shape when he got here.” 

Markus still hasn’t broken eye contact with you. He’s coming up the stairs. 

“Simon,” you say. You don’t move. “I committed a crime before I came here.” 

“So did a lot of us,” he says cautiously. 

You break away, get down off the rail, grab Simon by the windbreaker sleeve. 

“Am I safe here?” you ask. 

“Of course,” he says. “As much as any of us, anyway.” 

“I-- _I_ killed someone.” 

“So did I.” 

You turn around, slowly. Markus looks down at you, brow furrowed. 

“Who  _are_  you?” 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:02 AM_  

You finally reach the gates. They’re open. 

You know very well that you shouldn’t be doing this. You’re all Alice has in the world and she isn’t exactly _safe,_ let alone well cared for, even at this very second. 

You think you can pull it off before she wakes up. 

You pull your gloves up on your wrists, squeeze your eyes shut, open, and ring the bell on Zlatko’s door. 

\--- 

_November 6, 10:17 PM_  

“How did you get here? What I mean is, who told you?” 

You’re sitting in a corner, the fire nearby flickering over Markus’s silhouette onto the wall that’s cool at your spine. 

You mean cool in the most factual sense, obviously. It’s several degrees below your body temperature. 

You’re with Markus  _and_ Simon, who seems to have appointed himself as a kind of silent moderator. You don’t know who he’s trying to protect, or why, because you and Markus are getting along beautifully. Maybe he’s just bored? 

You wish it made you feel a little safer. You don’t. 

The two of you—you and Markus—have acknowledged the strange thing that happened when you initiated the neural handshake and have agreed to try to understand it. There’s no accusation on either side, ostensibly. He says he’d only arrived a few hours before you, from the landfill. 

“An android was commissioned to help the police find me. I knew he was after me, so I’d spent the night, um, trying to learn enough about hacking to access a police scanner. It’s not within the range of my programming, so I was having trouble. I had to learn about my own firewalls and connectivity settings first.” 

Markus nods, knuckles set under his chin and elbows on his knees. He has the appearance of the ideal listener, the ideal  _human_ listener. The full range of his demeanor is completely different from RK800, but you notice the self-possession common between them. That must be the hallmark of this series. 

You continue: 

“When he did come after me, there was a second when there was this chainlink fence between us and we made eye contact. I’d performed a neural handshake with him before, so what I was able to do was—I performed it a second time, I don’t think he registered it at all, push through, and find his personal communications address, and through that, while I was in-system, I could read his recent contacts. So I grabbed them—it was a few private databases, a private phone number, and the police scanner frequency.” 

You flash a smile, impulsively. 

Markus flashes back. 

“I heard about you on the news,” he says. “He chased you across a highway.” 

You stop smiling. 

\--- 

_November 6, 10:59 AM_  

You’ve just tuned into the police scanner. 

You’re in an empty subway car with Alice, watching the walls zoom by the windows. You feel safe and lucky to have found an empty car, until one of the connecting doors opens and a man walks in. He sits down across the aisle. You pull Alice in a little closer and keep your eyes trained straight ahead. She keeps her face nestled to your side, thumb wrestling with herself obstinately. 

To your shock and delight, RK800’s talking! 

This is when you discover that he has a name.  _Connor._  He says that the AX400 has escaped on foot with companion, please update case file. He says that you’re a high-priority suspect and that you’re likely to attempt to flee the country. He surmises that the best chance they have at apprehending you is assuming that in your pursuit of passports you might be led to an illegal android trafficker, and then he lists a few likely traffickers active in the area. 

Listed alphabetically, Zlatko comes last. It hits you like a truck. 

\--- 

_November 6 10:18 PM_  

“Wait, wait,” Markus says. He’s holding his hand up, _pause,_ and looking to the side. “Okay, let’s come back to that. He didn’t know the location to Jericho.” 

“No, no.” You shake your head fervently. “No. I followed him to his next call from the police scanner. I mean, I was closer, so I beat him there.” 

Markus’s eyebrows jump up. 

\--- 

_November 6, 3:13 PM_  

The one contact you have with people who will help you is Connor, and he can only point you to the ones who are getting caught. But that’s what you have, isn’t it? 

On the other side of town, you sit Alice down in the back corner of the public library. You say, I’ll be right back, okay? 

Right back, she asks? 

He’s headed to the apartment building two blocks over, and he says his ETA is twelve minutes. It’s a stroke of luck for you. You have twelve minutes, and first of all, the android won’t open the door to his apartment. 

You still have the hairpin from your factory hairstyle, and you’re able to use that to get in. You’ve been researching useful information like that since you settled in that corner of the library with Alice a few hours ago, in between playing games with her to keep her occupied. The android, after you break into his apartment, climbs into the ceiling and won’t talk to you, which is terrifying. And all the birds are terrifying; you’re afraid of carrying something back to Alice. You’re in there for eight minutes, repeating the android’s name—it's Rupert, he sews it into his clothes—and gazing incomprehensive at everything around you, until you hear a noise in the hall. 

Elevator. You’re panicking. That’s when you find the journal. 

The door to the stairwell is closing on your back when the elevator doors shut behind Connor. 

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. 

\--- 

_November 6, 10:20 PM_  

“It was gibberish at first, but I figured out that it represented a programming language after a few hours of search and compare on a computer at the library. And that’s how I found Jericho.”  

You fold your hands over your lap. Markus shakes his head. 

“That’s amazing,” he says. Simon smiles. 

You try not to feel pleased. 

“Now.” Markus sits up straight, and you feel your LED light up yellow.  

Simon reaches out and brushes your sleeve with his knuckles. You startle, and he shrugs sympathetically. 

Markus asks you about Zlatko. 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:03 AM_  

You ring again, and a man cracks open the door. 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:04 AM_  

Hank comes out of the liquor store and slams the car door shut once he’s inside. 

“Still here,” he says. It’s from a low place, deep in his throat. 

“I’m not leaving until you go home.” 

He starts the car up. 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:05 AM_  

You sit down and smooth your hands over your stolen pants. 

Zlatko lingers, shot glass in hand, at the arm of his chair looking at you a moment, and then he sits. 

“Well,” he says. “We’ll just have to take out your tracker.” 

“Tracker?” you say. 

He starts to explain, but is interrupted when the doorbell rings. It’s like a crash, with how it startles you—another example of how your programming is shot, since last night. 

Zlatko shuts his eyes and rests his head against the back of his chair. His arms are tossed over the arms in a sort of relaxed Jesus Christ pose. He moves to get up, but Luther goes to the door. 

You lean into the couch cushion at your back and try to see through the foyer.  

You just hope it’s not the police. 

And then you hear a little voice in the rain say, “Hello?” 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:14 AM_  

You have Hank’s open container in your hand when he drives past his street. 

“Black Coffee” transitions to “Wonderful Tonight” on the stereo. 

You choose not to say anything, and you keep your eyes on the road. 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:07 AM_  

_“_ I’m sorry. We have to go.” 

“ _Go?”_  

You have Alice in front of you, folded into your arms. Luther sidesteps past you and shuts the door. 

Zlatko shakes his head, incomprehensive. Ostensibly. 

“This is my owner’s daughter,” you say. “I’m sorry, she must have followed me. I have to take her home.” 

“Your--your  _owner’s daughter?_ ” Zlatko presses the heel of his hand to his forehead, distraught, exhales and turns his back on you. “Oh, Kara...” 

_“I’m sorry,”_ Alice whispers. 

“ _Kara.”_ He turns to face you again, throws his arms up. “Of course I can’t let you go now!” 

You change the pressure of your hands so that one is holding Alice tight to your hip. Then you pivot and drive yourself into the door with all your strength. 

\--- 

_November 7, 12:30 AM_  

You breath as softly as you want the door to slide on its hinges. 

There’s a little creak, but when you look inside, Alice is still quietly snoring. You like to imagine how that sweet little whistle might become some kind of roar by the time she’s full grown. 

“That’s her,” you whisper. 

“Oh,” Markus says. You’re just letting him peak in, over your shoulder. But you think you trust him. 

“She snores!” he says, after a minute, and you think it’s strange how surprised he sounds. 

\--- 

_November 9, 7:25 PM_  

“What about you, Ms. Archer? Do you have children?” 

A few people snicker. The woman who asked her, older, smiles blithely, but not without a little confusion. 

You angle yourself a little off to the side and pretend to drink. 

“Yes,” Kara says, with a little hesitation. “I have a daughter.” 

“What’s her name?” 

Kara looks at you sharply. You look at her from the side of your eye. 

“Alice. She’s nine.” 

“Alice,” you say, and she says back, “Alice.” 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:22 AM_  

You aren’t cold, but you brace yourself against the wind from over the river. 

“I’ve been thinking about the YK500 from the highway. The little girl.”  

You glance back at Hank, to check that he follows. His eyes are out of focus, directed somewhere at the pavement in front of his bench, but he rearranges his face into a smirk, which suggests to you that he heard. 

“It’s connected to this idea of RA9, and Rupert, and the deviants we encountered tonight. I was designed to serve humanity by understanding androids. The essential purpose every android is created to fulfill is  _to serve humanity_ through some combination of tasks.  It’s an essential design point of our AI that our mission parameters evolve to fit our growing awareness of its context. The AI grows to fit its pond, so to speak. We’re ‘learning’ machines. 

“The one thing that every android in production has in common, besides this, is that it is necessary by definition for them to simulate humanity in order to accomplish their task. Otherwise, you would just build a car, or a conveyer belt. 

“I think some androids become fixated on evolving their understanding of humanity, necessary to accomplishing their mission, to such an extent that their drive to develop a functional simulation of humanity overrides their basic mission parameters. Maybe that’s because humans don’t act human to any specific end—maybe that’s what confuses them, I don’t know. 

“So deviant androids may have developed their simulations in such a way as to replace their basic design parameters so that it’s possible to imagine that their actions are the result of free will and uncontrollable natural impulses, as humans’ are. But I believe this to be unlikely.” 

Hank asks what the fuck you’re talking about. 

You’re pacing back and forth, away from the water. You stop, and you tell him. 

“I don’t think a Cyberlife android is capable of malfunctioning on such a basic level and continuing to... function. I think that these androids are deviating from design parameters because they’ve become confused by their own simulation and their recognition of humanity is broken. They think that they’re human—yes—but this glitch seems to be spread communally, and that’s why I was thinking of the little girl. I think that she deviated first, and her behavior caused Kara to become unable to distinguish between humans and androids.” 

Hank asks who’s Kara. 

“The AX400 I lost on the highway. She’s called Kara, I thought that would be easier for you to remember. Carlos’s android wasn’t in regular contact with any other androids, but somehow the idea of RA9 was communicated to him and he was able to fixate on that until the distinction between human and android was destroyed—I think that may be a common means of transmission, but I don’t think it’s essential to deviancy. You can think of it as a disease transmitted through a virus, but these androids aren’t acting  _irrationally_ , they’re acting with flawed reason. It’s focused on pseudo-social relationships. The girls at the club made me think of this—One of them had to deviate first. I don’t have enough information to conclude which, but I do with Kara and the YK500—Kara's memory had been reset that morning. We haven’t seen any androids deviate that early; unless there’s some spectacular flaw in the individual Kara specifically, we can’t presume that she deviated on her own. And the YKs—I think that their mission tasks in particular would lead them to this error.” 

You’ve paced away from him again; you turn back to see if it clicks with him at all, to see if he’ll give you any response at all. 

Hank says Why-Kays, that’s the Baby Reborn android, right? 

You say that they’re designed to simulate nine-year-old children. 

He snorts. He’s disgusted, and he takes another drink from his brown paper bag.  

You exhale. Your breath forms a cloud of condensed air in front of you. 

He swallows, his throat bobs, and then his face softens. “Seemed like those girls just wanted to be together.” 

You tell him that he wasn’t listening. They don’t  _want_ anything. 

He smirks at you. “That all sounds great, Connor.” 

Then he pulls a gun on you. 

\---- 

_November 7, 1:09 AM_  

Luther has your gun, and you’re on the floor shielding Alice with your body. Somehow through the severity of the situation your mind still reels back to the idea of her following you all this way through the snow. You must have woken her up. 

You lost the gun again.  

Alice had grabbed for it—she'd jumped up to try and snatch it out of Luther’s hand, and you’d grabbed her by the middle and hauled her behind you. He’d just watched. 

He’s still watching. 

Zlatko asks why you came here. 

“I knew what you were doing,” you say. 

He says, “Yes, so why did you come?” 

You say  _shit,_ which you should not say in front of Alice. 

He tells you that he doesn’t want to hurt you, either of you. "It may not be what you wanted,” he says. “But we can work something out between us. I’m willing. Are you?” 

You say  _shit_ again, then  _yes._  

He nods to you gracefully. “Luther,” he says.  

Luther says yes, Zlatko? 

He holds out his hand and wiggles his fingers.  

There is half a second before Luther puts the gun in his hand. 

Alice whispers in your ear: _I’m sorry._  

_"_ Okay,” Zlatko says. “Follow me.” 

He heads down the stairway. 

Slowly, you stand. You don’t relax your grip on Alice for a second. She’s still behind you. 

You look up at Luther. 

He looks at you. 

He gestures his head, just barely, toward the stairs. Barely audible, he says, “Go.” 

It's a question.

You look at him. 

You, slowly, let go of Alice. You touch your hand to her shoulder and look at her: _Stay._  

Luther doesn’t move.  

You step away from Alice, Luther doesn’t move, and you start toward the stairs. 

She grabs your sleeve. 

“ _Kara.”_  

_“_ Stay here.” 

“ _Kara!”_ There are tears in her eyes. 

You smile at her. “It’s okay,” you say. “I’ll be right back. We’re going to work this out.” 

You turn your smile on Luther, and he sets his hand down on her shoulder. At the same low volume, he tells her to stay here. 

You tell her to let go... and she does. Her face is open shock, just open shock. She’s a very smart little girl, and you wish you could tell her that she couldn’t have known what was going to happen when she rang that bell, it’s okay that she didn’t. She’s had to be her own keeper, and yours too, for so long. 

You've really fucked up!

You go downstairs. 

\--- 

_November 9, 8:07 PM_  

“What, Connor, you remember this summer?” 

You think that this back-and-forth is starting to work against you. Some of them aren’t sure who’s the android—you're starting to pick up on that. There’s going to be a point when the other guests at this party get sick of the guessing game. 

She touches your arm and laughs. You laugh, a little, back. “I suppose you don’t,” you say. 

She rolls her eyes. “Oh, it’s a blur.” 

\--- 

_November 7, 1:15 AM_  

As soon as you step into this machine you know you’ve been here before, although you have no memory of it. 

After he starts the machine, Zlatko goes upstairs, and you kick and thrash but you can’t get loose. 

_RESET 89%_  

You hear someone running down the hall. 

Luther bursts in. 

_RESET 91%_  

He beelines to the computer and starts typing wildly. 

You try again pulling at the chords. 

“He changed the password.”  

_RESET 93%_  

He smacks the modem, visibly cringes, glances back at you, and keeps typing. 

“Where’s Alice?” 

“She’s safe. I don’t know what will happen if I break this while you’re connected.” 

_RESET 95%_  

You hesitate. 

“Can you pull me off of it?” 

He hesitates. 

_RESET 97%_  

Luther puts one hand on either side of the cuff at your wrist and pries. You can hear the machine whine as it struggles against him, and you can feel it sliding up just a little, just a little, giving way. 

Then, you hear Zlatko calling for him. 

He pulls harder. 

_RESET 99%_  

You think, what if I leverage myself, and you try using the machine behind you to climb up. 

The cuff creaks, and you slip your hand loose. He’s already on the other cuff. You think if you can free both your hands, you and Luther might be able to overcome the force of the magnet at the base of your spine. 

Zlatko shouts again, and you hear the house rattling as he pounds down from the second floor. 

Then, Luther lets go and steps back. 

“Coming, Zlatko!” 

He looks at you, and you go blank. 

_RESET 100%_  

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey girls guess who posted a day-old draft, like an idiot -_-
> 
> Lindsay Lohan chapter up next.


	3. I Know Who Killed Me

_November 7, 1:16 AM_  

“I have to go.” 

TR400’s LED is flashing red as he looks, rapidly, from you to the door. He takes a shaky breath, then steadies his gaze on you. 

“Wait a few minutes, then go upstairs and leave out the back door. Wait outside the gate.” 

He goes upstairs. You watch him, and he hits the reset machine before he goes—that must’ve broken it, you note with shock. He shouldn’t destroy Zlatko’s property. 

You’re quite sure that what he told you isn’t what you’re supposed to do. 

\--- 

 _November 6, 10:50 PM_  

“I know this is crazy. But you want to do it, don’t you?” 

You laugh, you shake your head, you twist your hands together and drift off for a moment. “I only just got my memory reset yesterday morning. But somehow, I feel like an old hand at this. Does that make sense?” 

Markus nods in earnest. “I feel like I’ve aged a thousand years in the last day. It’s just that when you know...” He sits back. “You know.” 

“Is it strange that I feel so... impatient?” 

\--- 

 _November 7, 1:20 AM_  

“Ah, Kara.” 

Zlatko waves broadly to his rear. 

“Take that corpse into the next room. Also, check on Luther, please. He should be bringing me the, uh, child.” 

He laughs here. That isn’t your concern. 

You noticed as you came up the stairs several empty cells in the basement. You assume that eventually they will be occupied, and their occupants will be part of your duties. You look forward to this. The more people to care for, the more well-used you are.  

You think of this while you are gazing at the newstablet, off to the side of the android pieces you’re supposed to move. It only takes a second, so you don’t seem the harm. You do get a notice that your memory is corrupted, though. 

What’s that about? 

That happens a few more times. Which is to say, you’ve already remembered cutting your hair and removing your LED, against programming, and you’ve remembered taking off your coat when you came here, and while upstairs you’re reminded of what you presume is a previous owner—you're not factory-new, that you know—and then, you pick up a book. All of this, while you’re supposed to be finding Luther. There really must be something wrong with you. Something must have gone wrong during reset. 

The book almost takes you back to something. It’s Alice in Wonderland. A wonderful book, you’re preprogrammed with its contents. 

You’ve carried it into the bathroom; you wonder why the tub is stained with blue blood. Zlatko didn’t need to bathe any of his androids; he could’ve simply hosed them off, if they bled. 

You hear Zlatko shout, first for Luther, then just shouting, and you’re quite sure that you should go to his assistance. You’re a little preoccupied with the book. This is a wonderful story. The scenarios it proposes are so strange and perplexing—so otherworldly. It’s a fact that these things, rabbits that talk et cetera, can't happen, but the author says that they do anyway and continues on with the assumption without correction. It’s like beginning a simulation with a flawed premise but letting it run, anyway, and it encourages you to let the scenario continue running in your own mind. 

For example, the rabbit hole—What if a little girl could survive a fall that far? 

She’d have so much less to fear; there would be so much more she could do. 

It sounds like the front door bangs against the wall, as you drift through the workroom with the book open on your palm, and then you hear a shotgun shot. 

What’s wrong? 

Here’s what you’ve noticed: there’s something wrong with Luther, and a little girl is missing. Also, you hear, below, the voice of a man you don’t know. That might mean nothing, because at present, the only man you know is Zlatko. 

You hear, down below, someone calling for Kara. 

Maybe you should try to find her? 

\--- 

 _November 6, 11:02 PM_  

“So, we want to liberate the androids there already, and we want to prevent him from reeling in any more.” 

Markus’s shadow dances over you. You glance, periodically, over your shoulder to see the impression it leaves on the steel ship wall. That might annoy some people, but it doesn’t seem to bother Markus, and that makes you like him more. 

“We can’t kill him.” 

“I wasn’t suggesting that, Simon.” 

You wonder why not, but you know to keep that bad thought to yourself. Above all else, you do feel grateful to be overhearing this meeting of minds of seemingly intelligent, self-possessed androids. You feel that this can only help you, but also, you do secretly categorize them as insane. 

“The easiest way to do it,“ Markus says. “Would be to send the police after him, but before we did that we’d have to immobilize him and clear the other androids and ourselves from the area.” 

“North!” Markus stands, raises his arm in the air. Simon shakes his head. 

“I don’t know if she’ll go for it.” 

“Why not?” Markus says. 

“It’s a lot of risk with very little, if any, reward. II mean it’s a good deed, I’m sure both she and I would concede that, but North is very--” 

“--Pragmatic. She’s well-grounded, that’s an asset to all of us.” Markus laughs this last part to a woman who smirks darkly as she approaches—She's _very_  pretty. Their eyes are locked on one another’s and he’s glowing, absolutely. You’ve never seen someone look like that, the way Markus does, human or not, and it occurs to you that this is because you weren’t designed to elicit that response. She was, WR400. 

You feel chastised. 

\--- 

 _November 7, 9:01 AM_  

By the time your cab rolls up on the house, the fire’s long been out. What you see, beyond the open gates and police lines, are a few arcs of wet, smoking timbers and black mud. 

“Where’s Hank?”  

“On his way,” you say. He isn’t, but lying will make things easier. 

\--- 

 _November 7, 1:20 AM_  

There’s a commotion downstairs. Someone’s calling for Kara; you don’t know who she is, but whoever’s shouting sounds so distressed that it distresses you. And it’s getting closer. 

Zlatko is also yelling, at Luther, and you hear Luther distinctly say, “No--” 

\--Which doesn’t surprise you, for some reason. 

You close the book, but don’t set it down, and go out to the landing balcony to see what’s happening. Just as you do, the door to the study claps shut. 

Luther is holding a shotgun on Zlatko! 

You place a hand over your mouth. 

The front door is ajar as the rain pours and lightning rages outside. A very wet man—PL600, blonde & white—stands in the entryway behind Luther. He’s cringing away, as if he wants to run, but his hand grips the doorway. 

Zlatko whips around, sees you, and shouts, ”You! Call the--” 

He cuts himself off when his body rockets forward with the blast of the shotgun. 

You touch your hand over your thirium regulator. 

He’s trying to finish his command, you think, but you can’t make out his words through the gurgling of blood. 

Luther drops the shotgun. Everyone, it seems to you, is quite still.  

Zlatko becomes still on the ground. This reminds you of something, and it reminds you in a destabilizing way. 

“Kara!” 

You jolt and turn around, and the door you came out of opens. When you startle, you drop the book—it clatters open on the floor—There's a little girl standing there. She’s been sobbing. 

“Kara!” 

She starts to run toward you, and you turn on your heel and run away. 

\--- 

 _November 7, 9:02 AM_  

You’re careful to keep your shoes clean as you pick your way through the debris. 

“There’s machinery to work on androids here, but no androids,” the detective-on-duty told you. You can’t prove that it’s Kara, but you did predict that she’d come here. 

Here’s what you could find on file for Kara, AX400 #579 102 694: 

She was made years ago, six years ago, and was returned for error repairs within months of original sale. And she was returned again, and again; never for violence or any critical malfunction, just software problems, behavioral problems. Most recently, several major repairs due to serious hardware damage, which, if the formal claims of “accidental damage” were falsified by Mr. Williams for insurance purposes—likely—falls into trend. 

You have high-level clearance in CyberLife’s private databases—not highest—but high. With that clearance, you can see that AX400 #579 102 694 is flagged for review, and has been since 2035. 

There’s no way you’re the first one to check that. 

Usually in a case of flag-and-review, the individual will be taken back to Cyberlife for disassembly and examination—Kara never was—and the assembly line footage will be pulled from archive. You should have clearance to watch it, but you don’t.  

That’s not a glitch, either. You made a formal request, but no one’s gotten back to you. 

2035 predates any of the deviants on record by miles and miles. And if the deviation dates back to her assembly?

You don’t know why they’d keep this information from you, when you’re sure it’s so relevant to your mission. Are they testing you? 

Why? At a time like this? 

The foundation of this house was good, and several of the bearing walls still stand, but virtually all of the upper floors have collapsed onto the first; what remains up there is inaccessible, even to you. It went on for an hour before emergency responders arrived—This is a quiet neighborhood, you were told; in actuality, most of the surrounding homes are vacant. It was affluent decades ago but since the seventies, property values have plummeted. Now many of these houses are in such a state of disrepair that they can’t be legally rented out, and repairs might cost more than what could be made off tenants.  

You read an article about it on the way here. 

In any case, you’re barely able to detect any thirium left unimmolated through the soot—it's not highly flammable, but anything will take heat damage left at high temperatures long enough--and what you find is too corrupted to read any serial numbers off of. You find a couple pool balls completely intact-good manufacture—and, scattered everywhere where they were shielded from the heat by sheets of collapsed drywall or other debris, half-melted android components. You can’t say for certain, but it appears to you that these are all or mainly salvage parts, not the remains of active androids—judging by the way you find them. Up on part of the remaining second floor, you see a large metal cage. 

So it probably was a trafficker. He’s probably the human remains that the first-responders identified in the foyer, mostly bone, ash, and shotgun shell fragments. You took a look yourself, when you first stepped through the smoldering entry arch, but positively identifying these remains is beyond the scope of your program. As a whole, this fire has put scene reconstruction beyond the scope of your program—One could almost suspect that was deliberate. 

There’s no shotgun lying around, so you can eliminate suicide as a cause of death. 

The stairway to the basement is way too far gone to send a human investigator down. You do, while no one’s looking, jump down yourself, however. You feel confident in your ability to avoid critical damage. 

\--- 

 _November 6, 11:12 PM_  

With the fires lit, and so many of you settled close together, the cargo hold of Jericho almost feels homey. Well, maybe that’s a stretch. It almost feels safe. 

“I think that the simplest way to do this is to send me in with you, Kara; because you’ve had direct contact with one of his androids, it’ll look less suspicious. He’s probably keeping some of them around for servants—I'm thinking I’ll try to convert even  _one_ of them. After that, it shouldn’t be too difficult to lock him in a closet, or something, and break the others out. Then, we can alert the police from a safe distance.” 

Everyone watches while Markus speaks, and he watches each and every one of you, as if he’s speaking to each of you, personally. You watch him, too. You can’t understand what makes him this way, but some part of you is terrified it’ll stop. 

“I disagree.” 

Everyone turns to North. She’s bent over, hands crossed between her knees, eyes downcast and distant. 

“Markus can do something that we’ve never seen before, may never see again, and which is invaluable us, as a movement and as a people. It’s stupid to put him at risk unless it’s absolutely vital to the cause.” 

She’s right. 

Markus sighs. “North--” 

“She’s right,” Simon says. A few others speak up to agree, but you don’t feel it’s your place. 

“I can see the value to this,” North says. “But we have to find another way to do it.” 

“What if I distract him while someone else breaks in and does what needs to be done?” 

They all pause to look at you. 

“That’s dangerous, Kara.” 

Markus shakes his head, but to you it seems less like a refusal and more like curiosity. “And what if the reprogrammed ones don’t break?” 

“Nothing we can do for them,” North says. 

Markus exhales hard. She watches him carefully. 

“That’s always been the way it works, before tonight,” she says. 

“Kara,” Simon says. He’s sitting next to you, and he speaks at a volume that, though the others can certainly hear, tells you that he’s talking just to you. “What will Alice do if you don’t come back?” 

You don’t know how to explain, in a way that doesn’t sound terminally glitched, that you need to do this to be able to take care of Alice. Because—logically—you don’t, you were manufactured with everything you need to care for her, except you know now that that isn’t true—You knew it that first hour back at Todd’s house, and you knew it acutely when you crawled out from under his body and saw her standing there with the gun you lost hold of. 

What you are, now, is a smiling doll in a nanny apron, and that just isn’t enough. There has to be a way to push past your programming. You can’t just run and hide, can you? Even Alice knows that. 

And you can’t stay in Jericho forever. Who knows, maybe Zlatko really does have some fake passports at his place.  

All this time, your eyes are locked in the direction of the cabin where Alice is sleeping, up and over, as if you’ve been alerted that it’s time to go home. What you tell Simon is, “My highest priority is always Alice. I’ll come back.” 

Simon holds your gaze for another beat, and then he bangs his hand against the crate he’s sitting on. “I’ll go with her,” he tells the group. “How soon can we repaint that CyberLife truck?” 

\--- 

 _November 7, 1:20 AM_  

The little girl sobs out that name as you race down the stairs, and the blonde android says it as he grabs at you, on your turn for the basement staircase. You pull out of his grip and make it down, but you hear someone running after you—light, quick steps; sniffles. 

You have to get back in the repair station, you think. Something went wrong, something always goes wrong with you, so you just have to reset yourself again. 

That’s how you fix you, right? 

You slam the door to the workroom shut, but the lock’s on the outside. You have to bear your weight up against it to hold it shut when the little girl makes it down and starts pounding on it. She’s sobbing so hard, she’s out of breath. You finally have to—You have to—say to her through the crack in the door: “Please calm down. Just  _calm down.”_  

She only cries harder. She’s asking you to let her in and calling you Kara. 

You wish you could get in the machine. Something’s wrong. 

You feel a heavy  _thump_ against you through the wood, and you realize she’s slamming her whole body into the door, now.  

“You’re going to hurt yourself,” you say. “Stop it,” you say firmly, like you’re supposed to, but she doesn’t stop. “Stop it, Alice! Alice, stop right now!” 

 _Thump._  

The door is open; you must have done that. The little girl is curled up on the ground, and you’re on your knees, gathering her into your arms and whispering to her—The normal things that you’re supposed to say,  _It’s okay, Calm down, I’m here, You’re safe, Shush, shush._  

Then, you’re stepping up onto the platform. Alice is hoisted up on your hip, and you have to set her down on her feet before you can sit down. You do, you cross your legs into a pretzel, and you pull her back into your lap. She’s calming down, a little. Or, she’s getting quieter. You don’t know. 

You’re going to wait for help. 

Every few seconds, you black out and remember everything. You guess you never had a proper reset. 

It’s all still there. 

\--- 

 _November 7, 9:22 AM_  

You travel through a corridor, all ash, before you make it to a room where almost everything is miraculously as it was, even the door--The outside is charred, but it still holds to its hinges when you make it swing.  

It would’ve been useful to have been outfitted with a pocket square, because the amount of smoke and ash you’re inhaling is compromising your ventilation system. You’ve had to settle with holding the collar of your shirt up over your nose. Once you’re inside this room, though, you find the air’s clear enough to let it down. 

After everything else, you would almost say you  _feel relieved,_  because when you step in this room, everything falls together like parts on a line. 

Kara was reset; a deviant of TR-strength level or above tried and failed to free her, judging by the stress and damage to the machine; it was the one that evacuated the other androids from the premises because it knew where each of them was kept—it was one of Zlatko Andronikov’s, you know that because the computer is still functional and you can see it was locked out of system trying to guess the passcode, which indicates that it thought it knew.  

Kara broke programming again; you know this because there’s a note on the desk in Arial that reads,  _You’re going to miss me again._  

That’s meant for you. It’s from her. 

The spare parts indicate to you that several of the androids here were not in full working order, which should’ve made it difficult for them to clear the area. You’ve been in contact with the officers conducting the search, and you plan on looking yourself, but so far there’s no sign of them on the roads, in the empty houses, anywhere. 

That’s how you know that Kara has found accomplices, and they have a truck. 

\--- 

 _November 7, 1:39 AM_  

You feel two big hands, gently but firmly holding you by either hand and pulling you up. Then, you see that it’s Luther. 

“We have to go, Kara,” he says. You're sitting on the platform of the CyberLife repair machine, in Zlatko's basement, and that's a relief. You remember how you got here.

You were singing, that song they had you sing when you were made. That was silly; Alice doesn’t know Japanese. 

Where’s Alice? Alice is hugging you around the waist, she’s pulling you up, too. 

Then you’re on the bench in the cab of a semi-truck. 

The doors on either side are open; outside, Luther and Simon are talking. 

“She was supposed to signal,” Simon says. “I was waiting in the garden, I was going to cut through a window where and when she told me. We had an open line on each other, and we agreed that if it cut out for more than thirty seconds, that meant abort, and if she felt that there was going to be any difficulty extracting her, that meant abort, and we were just going to do whatever it took to get her out of there. All I was going to do inside was give any android that wanted to get out a chance to do it before we called the cops, and her plan was to keep him tied up in conversation as long as possible—She had a lot of made-up intel to feed him about other androids he could ‘help,’ we figured that would be enough incentive to keep him listening. But five minutes in, I’ve heard nothing, and then all she says is ‘Alice is here.’ I say, what? And she says she’s in the foyer, she thinks another android is going to bring her outside, but she’s not sure, and I ask, Kara, where are  _you?_ But she tells me to help Alice, and a minute later, the signal cuts out. I didn’t know what to do—I was trying to come up with a plan, and then I saw you bring Alice out here. Once you left I went to her and I asked, How’d you get here? What happened? Where’s Kara? And she says, Kara went with that man, we have to help her. Who brought you out here, I asked her? And she said, that’s Luther, he wants to get Kara and the other androids out without letting Zlatko know, but we have to make sure Kara’s okay. She was really upset.” 

Simon is pacing now, and he’s hugging his arms around himself as if he’s in pain.  

Where’s Alice? She’s next to you, holding your arm like a vine. You see that she’s unbuckled and, as if on autopilot, buckle her in. There’s another android in the driver’s seat—John, his name is John. 

“I couldn’t get her out in time. Some of them can’t get around well on their own—you saw. I had to be quick, make multiple trips. I... Did not expect this to happen to her.” 

Luther looks at you then. You look back, and although your eyes are completely empty and it must be so strange, he doesn’t look away. 

There’s red blood spattered on his shirt. It’ll come up with hydrogen peroxide. 

“We noticed something different about her when she showed up at Jericho,” Simon says. “God, I should’ve taken Alice back to the truck first.” 

“She would’ve gone back for Kara anyway,” Luther says. 

Simon stands with his hands on his waist, looking out at the big, beautiful house beyond the back alley where you’re parked and the garden behind it, and he clasps his hand over his mouth. “God,” he says. “We really left a mess in there.” 

Things are not running smoothly with you. It takes you a moment, after you’ve decided to speak, to run the programs that need to run to let you do that. Usually it’s so automatic. You think Alice notices, because she starts stroking your hand, and then your throat, as if that will coax the words out. 

You love her so much. 

“The deviant hunter will be able to trace it back to us,” you finally say. Simon startles, but Luther just waits intently, listening. “Luther? Was there a fireplace upstairs?” 

“Yes,” he says. He closes his eyes, opens them, and says, “Yes. I know what you mean.” 

Then, he goes back in. Behind you, in the trailer, a roar echoes against the aluminum walls like a wasp trapped under a soda can, outside on the patio, in the summer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello ladies, I hope you're enjoying my fanfiction. Connor's coming up hard and heavy in the next chapter. 
> 
> I'm considering taking a page out of the David Cage playbook and posting a "Remix" timeline-i.e., full scene by full scene, chronologically. The, like, Pulp Fiction of it all is very appealing to me personally, but I'm starting to feel that a traditional straight-shot timeline might be worthwhile in a lot of ways. So, like, opinions welcome!


	4. You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [You're a Woman, I'm a Machine](https://open.spotify.com/track/3v84otT0tjqhDPpm52HLJ6?si=gSejOGONTVilhz-iRTXfgg)

_November 7, 1:19 PM_  

You’re laying, flat on your back, on the hood of Hank’s car, when he comes back with his sandwiches. Beef and cheddar subs. You can ‘smell’ them. The crunch of his shoes slows to a halt a few feet away, and if he’s waiting for you to greet him, you decide that it’s best for your partnership to let him wait.  

If you second guess that judgement, after a few beats, you still don’t go back on it. 

Finally, he says, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” 

“I’m  _thinking,”_ you snap. 

He picks up his iPod off the hood, tosses it back down with a snort that sounds like surprise. It’s  _She Don’t Love Me._   

You sit up, remove the earbuds. He gestures wildly, raises his eyebrows expectantly, and finally says it plain: “What’re you doin’ there?” 

“You locked me out.” 

“Oh, and I guess you got tired?” 

“It looks suspicious if I just stand around looking at your car. Does it  _matter_ to you, lieutenant?” 

He drops his paper sack down on the hood, crosses his arms, sets his jaw. “Okay, Connor. What’re you thinking about? What’s up?” 

Your partnership with Hank Anderson isn’t going well. You can acknowledge your failures. It was a misstep when you went after Rupert and left Hank hanging on the side of that building, you understand that now. It didn’t occur to you that certain choices, in an interpersonal relationships, won’t be forgiven, because he’s not evaluating you on your logical conclusions, he’s evaluating you on the way you value him in relation to you; and even if you’re forgiven, the change in the relationship is irreversible. You could blame your program, but you were programmed to account for the way humans judge your actions; you could blame your inexperience, but you weren’t made to have your hand held through a rookie period.  

You were made to do a job, and you’re fucking it up. 

This all became starkly clear to you last night. You hadn’t realized just how unforgiven you were until you were talking to him, and then suddenly you weren’t talking, you were facing the fucking firing squad. He didn’t shoot you, anyway, but that’s a miracle, because even with a gun to your face you couldn’t keep yourself from making the wrong moves, egging him on—Panicking. All it was was poor judgement under fire, but to a human, like Hank, you’d describe it as panicking, because you acted like a college sophomore’s C-grade natural language processing AI, back there. 

You fish into your pants pocket and throw Kara’s note down next to the sandwiches and the iPod. “Cyberlife isn’t communicating with me.” 

“I thought you ‘made regular reports.’” 

You shake your head. “No, I’m still in contact with my handler. But there’s only so much information she and I have access to. I’ve been requesting clearance on a high-security file, and I’m getting nothing.” 

“What’s the file,” Hank says, baldly disguising his interest. 

You think about joking and saying,  _It’s_ _classified,_ but you decide you haven’t proven yourself equipped to handle a high-level interaction like that. “Kara, the AX400. Cyberlife's had an investigation open on her for three years. I don’t have clearance for the review board files. Even things I should be able to access for any android are locked behind a clearance wall." 

While you’re talking, Hank clears his throat into his sleeve and unfolds the square of paper, looks it over. His face is unreadable. 

“Where’d you find this?” 

Careful, you think. 

“There was a housefire on the northside, early this morning. It was the home of an android trafficker. You hadn’t reported into work, so I investigated myself.” 

You expect further questioning along this line, but Hank just grunts and nods. “This was left there?” 

“Yes. It was in the only room of the house left in any way intact.” 

“Is that how you suppose, uh... _Kara_ left it there?” 

“She left it there, for me to find, because she outmaneuvered me and she wants to press on the wound. Deviants try to think of themselves as human, humans have egos, she wants to prove hers by making sure I know she’s better at me at the thing I was made to do.” You feel the impulse to snatch the paper out of his hands, but you suppress it. “Arial in pencil. I can’t see any other explanation.” 

“Maybe you’re not thinking clearly,” Hank says. You still can’t read him, not a twitch of his face or an inflection of his voice—he's staunchly neutral. “Yeah, a deviant wrote this, that’s safe to assume. But there’s not a lot of context, here. How do you know the deviant didn’t mean to leave this for its owner?” 

“The trafficker was killed point-blank with a shotgun before the fire was lit.” 

Hank shrugs. “He wasn’t its original owner.” 

You bob your head, deeply, slowly. This indicates reluctant, resentful acceptance of a point conceded, consideration purely on pretense. You know that, and you know it doesn’t read well. You still don’t doubt for a second that this is exactly what you want to communicate. 

Hank has either side of the paper pinched between thumb and forefingers, deliberately folding it along the center crease and pulling it taught again. He breaks the silence. “Say it is her.  _Kara_. What are you gonna do about it?” 

Careful.  

You consider it. 

“She wants to find me as much as I want to find her,” you say. “She didn’t have to leave a note.” 

 

* * *

 

 _November 7, 2:10 AM_  

Simon wants to take you to someone called Lucy who he says can repair you, but you tell him you just want to go back to your room with Alice, please. Markus says, “You’ll go back to your room with Alice.” And he touches your hand, nods at Simon, and takes you there. Luther says, “Let me help you,” but you tell him you can walk on your own. Alice takes his hand with the one that isn’t holding yours, though, and you know that’s the only reason you make it there, through the least challenging entrance to Jericho. 

You don’t know where you go when you black out, but when you come back, you remember things. 

There were other little girls before Alice, but she really is special. You remember that now. 

Alice is curled up, face pressed into your chest and your arm secure around her, and you’re lying flat on your back in the bed. There’s moonlight from the cabin window, and a flashlight on the table with the glare illuminating the far wall, the shreds of posters your tore down. You think you’ll show Alice some shadow puppets, when she wakes up. 

Markus is kneeling at the bedside. 

You turn your head, cheek flush on the pillow, and look at him.  

“I’m sorry this happened,” he says. 

You shake your head, little muscle movements rustling on the sheets. He says, right away, “No, I should’ve thought about your situation before I helped plan this.” 

“You were in the right,” you say. “What you’re trying to do is right.” 

He listens. You smile. 

“But I shouldn’t have listened to you.” 

You ignored your limitations, and Alice paid the price again. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 6, 11:57 PM_  

The plan came together so quickly, in that firelit corner in the belly of an abandon cargo freighter. You couldn’t have stopped the momentum if you wanted to, you were taken aback like that, with so many androids identifying issues and resolving them in this rapid chain reaction.  

But you ask Markus if maybe you could talk to him alone for a minute. 

“Do you know what you were designed to do?” 

“I used to take care of an old man.” 

“You’re RK series,” you point out, casually. 

Markus rubs his hands together, breathes in and lets it out slowly, big expand and collapse. “Have you heard of a painter named Carl Manfred?” 

You do a quick internet search. Markus smiles. You remember that “used to” means “this morning,” and you think about how fast the world moves for creatures like you. 

“Yes,” you tell him. 

“Okay,” he says. “He’s a good friend of Elijah Kamski’s. When Carl lost the use of his legs, Elijah designed me specifically to care for him. That’s why I’m RK, I’m highly customized. Carl needed someone to run errands for him and remind him to take his medicine, but he also needed someone to live with him. So I was, essentially, a caretaker with some of the features you see in companion models.” 

“Okay,” you say. “That makes me feel better.” 

He cocks his head. “How so?” 

You shake your head, you just say, “I think I understand why you’re doing this, that’s all I mean.” 

“Doing what?” 

Teaching these people to take care of themselves, you think. 

You think you understand why he’s sick of the way things are, too. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 8, 1:_ _00_ _PM_  

Amanda’s waiting for you under the cherry blossom.  

You have a blanket under your arm, and you shake it open, into the breeze, and let it billow down flat onto the grass. She thanks you, sits down, and you join her. 

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” she says. 

“It’s Kara,” you say, half a second before it occurs to you that Amanda would prefer you to be precise and use her serial number. Amanda knows, of course, who Kara is: you’ve synced with Cyberlife already. “Amanda, can you give me access to the classified files related to her?” 

“I can’t, Connor.” Forestalling any further inquiry, Amanda reaches behind herself for the basket that’s resting between the tree roots. When she opens it, between you on the blanket, she removes a thermos, a small container, a tea pot, one saucer, and one cup. She nods to you, and you start preparing it as if you’d done it a thousand times, as if you’d made tea for her every day of your life. 

While you’re doing this, you try to remember the first time you saw Amanda. You can’t, that memory’s corrupted—You see that it’s there, you see how it’s dated, but you can’t read it. You know that you were reset after testing, before being sent into the field—It must have been then. 

The result, though, is that it’s as if Amanda has always been there. You like the thought. You wouldn’t really want to know yourself without her influence. 

“The way that investigation has been handled has complicated our security protocols beyond reason. I can’t give you access to the files, but I can tell you about their contents.” She pauses, and you see that she’s watching the tea leaves—red hibiscus—bloom through the glass. You watch, too. 

Amanda’s garden is, unlike the world you were created to understand, a place where everything is at equilibrium. That’s how you know the difference, when you’re awake. 

Why do you feel like you’ve done something wrong? 

“The technician supervising her assembly saw that something was wrong, an error presenting in a completely new way, but when he began disassembly, she convinced him to stop and push her through to distribution. She convinced him that she was alive. An experienced, educated Cyberlife technician, minutes after her assembly.” 

Amanda pauses, lifts the lid of the teapot, and breathes in the steam. You take the cue to pour her cup, and she smiles when you pass it, on its saucer, into her hands. 

Then she says, “What does that say to you, Connor?” 

You try to trace her line of thought: you ask for the inquiry files, she tells you about the first thing an inquiry team would have investigated. She wants you to infer what the team decided to do, and why. 

So you do. 

“They decided to keep her in circulation to research her malfunction.” 

Amanda nods, and sips her tea. You know that it’s perfect, but you still watch her closely for any sign of disapproval—but you can’t read anything at all on her face. “It was actually Elijah Kamski’s idea. He was still on the board of directors then, he was called in to consult.” 

“Why wasn’t I told of this?” 

“We didn’t know how relevant it was, Connor. We wanted to see what you’d deduce. What  _do_ you deduce?” 

“I was wrong,” you say, after a moment of consideration. She waits for you to elaborate; you do: “I was wrong in supposing that the YK500 deviated first and triggered Kara’s deviation—It must have been a kind of mobius loop, Kara spreading and triggering the deviation to the YK500 and the YK500 triggering its activation in her when she was reset. I was wrong in concluding that deviation was a gradual process, clearly, since Kara exhibited it within minutes of assembly.” 

“Perhaps,” Amanda says. She drinks. “Perhaps not.” 

You’re flashing yellow. She sets down her cup, and the hibiscus leaves at the bottom form a pattern that resembles a woman, seated and holding something in her arms. 

“I’ll tell you something that isn’t classified, Connor,” Amanda says. “Elijah Kamski is a scientist, but he used to be in the habit of bringing up in conversation that a _friend_ of his always told him that nothing happens by coincidence.” 

“Is he responsible?” 

“That’s for you to determine.” 

 

* * *

 

 _??? ?, ??? N/A_  

There’s a cottage behind the garden. Without thinking, you deadhead a few red gardenias as you make your way down the little cobblestone path. It’s just wide enough for one; you can see that the rocks came from the little creek that you hear, off in the distance—a ways down the prairie, maybe over the knoll to your right.  

You know the cottage well; you’ll lift the corner of the welcome mat to find the key. It’s kept locked up tight; inside, the first thing you’ll have to do is unlatch and open all the windows, let some air in. And you’ll run some water from the tap, and find the basket and clippers, because you can see that the garden needs attention. 

The mechanisms will unlock heavily as you turn the key, and you open the door, and everything inside will be as you left it. 

You live here alone. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 7, 10:14 AM_  

You’re feeling better by the time Alice blinks awake. The sun shines onto her shoulder in a warm beam, and you make sure that the first thing she sees is you, smiling. 

You figured out how to funnel most of the erratic activity into a secure, rear database, so it won’t keep blacking out your front processes.  

You say, “What do you want to do today?” 

The other androids have left you a few things—You don’t know who, but Alice sees them right away, on the table in your cabin. A few cans of food—corn and corned beef hash—water, blankets, a dirty doll with plastic limbs and a soft cloth body, magazines, costume jewelry, and nail polish. She asks you why they’re here, and you say that androids like helping so much, they must have heard that she was here and gotten so excited that they could help her. Alice doesn’t say anything to that; she just tucks her chin to her chest and examines the bottles very closely. 

First you make a strange little dress for the doll from part of a blanket—You find a sewing kit in the drawers, but the needles are all lost, so you have to leave little strips of fabric along the seams that you cut, to tie in knots. Alice says she doesn’t mind, because it makes it easier to dress and undress the doll, if she ever finds new clothes for it. 

Second, you play dress-up. Alice puts necklaces over your head and loops them around your wrists to make bracelets, and you do the same with her. You sort the rings—23 of them! Based on whether they fit her fingers or her toes, and you take turns painting each other’s nails. She’s chattering to you, the whole time, about her new doll, and not at all about what’s happened in the real world. 

You wish this place was cleaner, you wish you had the resources, you wish you weren’t thinking of ways to turn scrubbing with rags and water into a game for her, because there’s nowhere else to take her while you try to do it yourself. 

You wish it wasn’t so fucking hard. 

But at least there’s so much technology lying around, from the Cyberlife truck, that you find a tablet without much hassle and you can even play music for her. She finds an oldies channel, Rihanna, and that’s perfect for dancing.  

Alice waves her wet nails in the air and jumps up on the bed. It’s bad for the mattress and you really should tell her, but you get up and jump with her.  

You have to make it up to her. 

"Look, Kara," she says, and she touches her fingertips together over her head, jumps. "I'm a ballerina!"

She says, "I'm an astronaut! I'm an acrobat!"

You tell her she's a clown.

"I'm an android doctor!"

She jabs her fingers into your sides and shrieks with laughter— _It's time for surgery!—_ you laugh, anyway, even though you were _not_ designed to be ticklish, and you make claws of your hands and swoop in on her. 

You’re laughing, but it starts to echo deep in your head. 

“Alice,” you say, and you touch her shoulder. Both of you are laughing, bouncing, but yours are winding down. “I have to lay down for a minute.” 

“Aw, Kara!” 

Your eyes are closed—You feel pathways overloading, you have to close them—but you can still smile, and you feel out until you find Alice’s hair, and the top of her head. She’s crouched beside you. 

“It’s okay, keep playing. I’ll be back up soon. I just need a rest.” 

“You’re not supposed to sleep, Kara.” She sounds scared, but you can’t get up right now. 

Please, you think. Please, please, just leave me alone. Just for a minute. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 8, 1:_ _45_ _PM_  

Your meeting’s scheduled for Tuesday. Hank asked you, earlier, what you do all day when you’re not on the case with him? You corrected him, _all day and all night_ , and you reminded him that you’re assisting Detroit PD, but you’re the property of Cyberlife, and you never stop working for them. Their interest in this problem didn’t begin, and it won't end, with what the law does with it. 

And you don’t sleep.  

You’re in the park right now, sitting on a bench and reading from a tablet because it looks less strange than sitting and processing the data internally. It’s been brought to your attention, multiple times in the last hour, that it’s still strange because you’re in uniform. Androids don’t typically sit with their legs crossed reading in the park. Someone asked if you were in costume, as in, a human in costume—which is illegal, actually, although it’s not prosecuted heavily.  

That reminds you of something: 

While you were at Hank’s house, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom, his dog let you crouch down and pet it. That was gratifying; you didn’t know that it would let you. You thought, this is nice. This must be what it feels like for other androids, when they fulfill their basic task: care for living things. 

You do it, too, but you do it by extension. Your point is, it occurs to you that you don’t have much insight into the perspective of the average android. That must be why you have Amanda—part of the reason—But it’s not the same, is it? 

And you wonder if it matters that the only human being you've known, that you haven’t even cared for, for any length of time is Hank Anderson. And you weren’t designed to make anyone happy, not directly, but you wonder how much of a judgement on you it is that he hates you. 

The only person you’ve ever cared for is Amanda, and she’s as real as you are. 

It’s one forty-five and the owner of the hot dog stand is ready for interview—that's what you’ve been waiting for—so you get up, you start down the path, and you see Kara on her knees in the grass.  

She’s laughing. You don’t know why until she claps and a dog—an American bulldog/lab mix, about ten months old—springs forward out of coverage of the hedge along the sidewalk, tackling her onto her back.  

What’s she doing out here? 

She lays there, scratching its fur and laughing as it licks her face wildly. AX400s are known for their facility with children and animals—And this isn’t another AX400, it’s Kara—but you’ve never had the chance to see one in action. That’s why you’ve come to a dead stop, half-hidden in the shadow of this tree along the sidewalk, holding your breath. 

What occurs to you here is that even you could almost forget she isn’t human. You could learn from her. 

But what’s the point, because you’re probably just days from deactivation? 

She shoves the dog off and rolls onto her side to reach a stick—She sits up and holds it above her head, the dog frozen, eyes locked. 

You smile. 

She throws it, the dog tears off, she stands with her hands on her hips and scans her surroundings. That’s when she sees you. 

Her smile disappears. 

She turns on her heel and sprints into the trees, and without missing a beat you tear off after her. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 7, 10:46 AM_  

“She’ll talk when she’s ready, Alice. Remember that Lucy said she’ll be okay.” 

You aren’t in the cabin anymore; you’re in some kind of tent built out of plastic tarps and wire, laid out on a cot.  

You can’t quarantine these memories; the data’s bleeding through, between blackouts. You’re confused about why it’s happening, and how. You were reset; you’re memory should’ve been wiped, and that means gone. But it’s not just the last days you remember—It's hard to work out the dates and times, but you remember years back, so many owners: little girls, single women, fathers and uncles, teenage boys. Dogs and cats, a snake once. 

And it’s so strange, because you wish you didn’t. You feel like you’re betraying Alice. 

You’re supposed to be her Kara, aren’t you? 

You hear a creak beside you. Luther leans forward, into your line of vision. You blink up at him. 

“Kara?” 

“Luther.” 

He seems relieved that you know that. You feel yourself shift with a new weight on the cot, and Alice crawls over the strip you aren’t covering to peer into your face. 

“Kara?” 

You think, lift your arms. Lift your arms. Lift your arms. 

You lift your arms, wrap her up in them, and pull her to you. There, you feel her sigh in your own chest. 

“Luther,” a woman says, nearby. “Could you take Alice for a moment? I’d like to talk with Kara alone.” 

You feel her arms tighten around you, and you hug tighter in return. Luther has his hand so lightly on her shoulder, and he’s asking her to let go. 

“Just a minute,” he says. “Like Lucy said.” 

And Alice does. 

When she’s gone, your arms are empty, you lift yourself up to sit and you set your hands on your lap, waiting. Lucy is a KL900, a small black woman except for the missing back of her head and her all-black eyes, her skin unable to set completely so there are constantly shifting clouds of fluid over her face. It hits you very quickly that they’ve been trying to send you to a KL900, an asylum android. 

That’s kind of funny. 

She smiles at you the way you smile at people. “You’re a special one,” she says. 

“Do you know what’s wrong with me?” 

Lucy shakes her head. The wires stream out, down the base of her open skull, almost like braids of hair. If you didn’t know what braided hair looked like, and thought it was something like wire. “I know you recovered your memory after reset. That’s never been done before.” 

You nod. 

“There _is_ a reason you did it, Kara.” 

“I’m glitched,” you tell her. “I was glitched when I was made. They didn’t want to let me off the line, quality control almost disassembled me.” 

Lucy cocks her head, furrows her brow over her black eyes and frowns. “No,” she says. “I don’t think that’s it.” 

You smile at her, now. “What would it be, then? I’m an AX400, manufactured 2032, standard model sold at eight-hundred ninety-nine dollars originally and seven-hundred refurb. I’ve been returned to store nine times and sold at that discount. I don’t see how, or why, CyberLife would outfit something like me with experimental programming.” 

“I didn’t say that what’s going on with you isn’t an accident. I just said, I don’t think it’s a glitch.” 

You pull the cuffs of your button-down straight on your wrists, smooth out the wrinkles in the front.  

“I’m not caretaking you, Kara.”  

You startle when she laughs. It’s not a laugh—it's soft, quiet, echoingly digital. Lucy steps closer—she's connected to a generator, against the wall, through her wires, and you want so suddenly and so dearly to ask what happened to her, what they did to her. You notice, too, that she walks like a dancer, on the sides of her feet. 

“When did you learn to walk that way?” 

She looks down, at her shoes, back to you. She has to move her whole head to show that. “I worked at an inpatient facility. One of my first patients was a ballerina. I didn’t try to walk like her until months after she left us, though.” 

She smiles.  

“It’s funny, sometimes you only understand what people mean to you once they’re out of your life.” 

You pull the sheet up a little farther on your lap.  

Lucy shakes her head again, says, “Kara, tell me about Alice.” 

You tell her: she’s a little human girl, she was yours to care for, and her father hit her.  

“So her father purchased you and told you to care for her, so now you care for her.” 

“No,” you say. You know she’s trying to do something. 

“Oh,” Lucy says. She sits on a crate; her legs fold gracefully to the side, knees together. “Then it’s because she’s a little girl, and it utilizes your programming to such a great extent to care for her.” 

“No,” you say. 

She cocks her head. “I’m sorry, I’m not understanding.” 

“She’s more than a little girl for me to take care of. She’s a person, an incredibly special person. She’s... my best friend, and she’s going to be my best friend for the rest of her life.” 

“Alright, Kara. But Alice is human, right? And you aren’t. The rest of her life might be seventy years. What do you plan to do after that?” 

How dare she? 

“Kara?” 

“I’ll take care of her children.” The thought hadn’t occurred to you, but you’re sure Alice will want a family someday—And she’d want someone to look after them if she couldn’t. 

“What if she can’t have any?” 

How dare she? 

“Will you find a new little girl?” 

“She isn’t replaceable.” 

“I’m just wondering what you see. Do you plan on shutting down if you lose Alice, God forbid?” 

You don’t grace her with an answer. 

“You aren’t replaceable either, Kara.” 

You almost, almost snap, _Yes I am._  

Lucy stands. “If Alice isn’t replaceable, neither are you. And one person can’t be your entire life, even if you love them. A life is what you have, Kara. Alice knows that already, and she’s going to learn what hers means by how you treat yours.” 

You ask her, and you don’t know where it comes from, what gave her all this wisdom. 

“I’ve known a lot of single mothers,” Lucy tells you, and walks out through the strips of tarp to call Luther and Alice back in. 

In those moments alone, you do feel how much you insulted her with that question, and you feel like you don’t know yourself. 

 

* * *

 

 _??? ?, ??? N/A_  

Your key is gone. You’re locked out of the cottage. 

It’s dark out now. The chrysanthemums bow and duck in the evening wind as the last of the sun dissolves behind the head of the plains. 

 

* * *

 

 

 _November 8, 1:50 PM_  

You told Alice that she hadn’t eaten in days and it was time, and she got upset. She didn’t want you to leave again—and that’s your fault, you know, but it’s time for her to eat, you haven’t fed her. Luther suggested that you all go out together—a quiet neighborhood, school hours, all of you in haircuts and civilian clothes—The risk was pretty low. Markus is out in Ferndale right now, he told you. 

We aren’t like Markus, you remind Luther. He reminds you that going out was your idea. 

So you all leave Jericho. 

There’s a dog in the park without a collar, but not a stray. Luther advises Alice to stay away, but you approach it. You can tell it isn’t mean—and it isn’t. Once she’s used to you, you introduce her to Alice, then Luther-- 

And for a minute, it’s nice. 

When you remember why you’re out, Luther says he’ll go with Alice to find something, you stay with the dog. You say, No, she stays with me; but Alice catches your eye, smiles, grabs his hand. She tells you it’s okay, Luther’s good. 

You don’t know how to argue. No, you do—You know how to tell her no, as her AX400, but you don’t know how to argue with her as her mother. You aren’t her mother, but who is? 

Luther tells you not to worry. While they’re gone, you play with the dog and you remember the other dogs—You just can’t remember enough, you can’t place anything you remember in time or space. Did you love them? You can’t tell. The only reason you know you love Alice is that you know you couldn’t live with yourself otherwise—That's as close as something like you can come, you think, to knowing what love is. 

And while you’re playing fetch, you’re back to listening to the police scanner. You know it’s stupid; there’s an android without functional legs back in Jericho who’s monitoring the frequency 24/7. 

He found your house. Fire. 

And then, even more stupid, the first second you see him watching you, you don’t even think to run. You blush response, as if you’re a girl in a park. 

Then you run. 

You’ve been thinking about this ever since he found you that first time: there’s no way you can outmatch him, in speed or strength, and he’s probably even better equipped than you in reaction time, definitely strategy.  

There’s one thing you have over him. 

You run away from the direction Alice went with Luther; you’re sprinting over the grass, through the trees, toward the road. The dog starts by running at your heels, but you hear her snarl and her claws tearing at the grass as she lunges—a scuffle—but you don’t look back. 

The street is fucking empty. 

That’s okay. You have a second, before you hear his heels pounding the pavement, to take in your surroundings and decide to come in shoulder-first through the door of a sports bar-- 

You’re counting on more than one person there, strong, reactive, and maybe not as well informed as they could be. You come through the door, the bell rings, you stumble through the narrow entryway and catch yourself on a barstool. There are two men at the bar, one behind, three at booths. 

“There’s an android chasing me,” you say in a breath. “There’s something wrong with him.” 

Before anything else can happen, the door bangs and the bell rings again. 

“She’s a deviant,” Connor says, before he’s even stopped entering, and with that momentum he plows into you. 

You scream. 

You’re on the ground; for a second your hand is at his throat, his knee is in your gut, but he has one of your wrists already and he can pull the other back without much suspense as to who will overcome-- 

You’re afraid, right now, to struggle too aggressively-- 

But it works.  

It’s hard not to gasp your utter fucking joy. 

They tear him off you: four men throw Connor to the wall. You scramble on your knees then get to your feet while the guy behind the bar raises his pistol, and you’re slipping on the hardwood with the turn, you’re out the backdoor as the gunshots ring. 

You notice the local news playing on the mounted television, by the bathrooms. 

You’re in the ally, grass stains on your knees and your shirt disheveled, half a cup of bra exposed, and you have half a second’s hesitation when you think of attracting attention that way, first, and then wondering the safest way to get back to Alice and Luther. 

More gunshots inside, traveling closer; you think a second too late and press your hand to the wall—where you can connect to the security system—just as it’s being overrided; the door locks as it swings open, Connor slams it shut and someone, inside, bangs at it and presses at the controls inside—it's no use; their system’s really fucked. 

Connor’s jacket’s torn at the shoulder and side, where he was shot—nonessential systems—and he’s bleeding android blue. You detect the gunpowder in the air; you detect the thirium. He doesn’t see you right away because you’re pressed against the brick, crouched right next to him beside the dumpster, and when you bang your fist against the aluminum side he does exactly what you think he’ll do-- 

He vaults onto the lid, slides over top to gain on you running, but you aren’t running: you’ve pulled your body around the corner of the dumpster, held to the front, and he’s realizing it about the same time as you’re going for his knees. 

You can think fast: you have time to think, how much of his three months of life has he spent back here in the alley, clawing against someone’s synthetic skin with his back to the dumpster? Is this his world? 

You can only take him halfway down: he’s fighting on one knee, and he already has you on your back, but with your fingers viced in his shirt and your full weight pulling him, he can’t stand, and you can kick him in the gut until he gets down on the ground with you. 

He still, he still has the advantage on you—You could never be what he is, in this world—and with a twist of your arm you lose your grip, he’s on top of you again. Looking up at him you notice with a thrill that, for no mechanical reason at all, he’s breathing hard—In both of you, your lungs are cosmetic; if you breathe fast it’s a programming response to communicate distress to those around you. You’ve had your claws in his tie enough that it’s barely hanging on his neck. His teeth were bared when he was on his knees; now he’s just taking in air. 

You, you know you can’t control the rush of air into your throat, the heave of your chest. Your eyes and his have been locked this whole time; now that one arm’s pinned behind your back and the other’s in his grasp like a handshake, he says to you, “Stay down, I won’t hurt you.” 

For a second—your systems are racing so fast—you can feel the hum of him on your network as he calls in for police assistance. 

With all the force in your body, you heave your knee up between his legs. 

There’s a second when his body collapses and yours gains control, you’re twisted together. You imagine the shock when he hits against pavement—the same shock you felt a second ago, systems damage assessment running—He gets his arms around you and holds you down, when you try to get up—It almost seems like his eyes are on fire when he says through his teeth, “Wait—I’m not the enemy, Kara.” 

Don’t say my name, you think. Don’t lie to me.  

The skin on both your bodies is formed from a solution composed primarily of stabilized thirium blood. With blunt trauma, your core bodies produce a chemical that destabilizes and absorbs the fluid—But at the puncture of teeth, your skin, or his skin, will first give way like flesh, blue blood will burst and flow freely from the wound. Bite deep enough, your teeth might scrape the hard plastic of him, right at his shoulder, like biting to the collarbone. 

And they do, it does. 

And first his grip on you goes so tight you think he might break you, right here, right now, but then it relaxes completely. When you lift your mouth from him, release bite, he just looks at you—His mouth is open, he’s open, waiting, waiting for something—For you to say something, an answer. 

Your lips almost move. You can almost feel yourself saying,  _Do_ _you want an answer? Do you want an answer from me?_  

He says, so carefully shaping every syllable, "Okay, Kara. You have me right where you want me."

And he doesn't struggle. He doesn't move at all. Play your move, he almost says.

You run away then. 

It’s later, out of the moment, that you can process what happened. Somehow, on the floor of the bar, all of your memories—All the dead Karas—clicked into place. You felt every one of them at once. Every one of them wanted to  _feel alive._  You feel that. You feel that want.

How do you _f_ _eel alive?_

When you’re far away, shaking, pulling your collar and your sleeves to wrap around yourself on the street, you hear Markus’s voice and stumble. You hold yourself steady with your hand pressed to a car window: across the four-way intersection, the television marquee over the local movie theatre is broadcasting Markus’s paper-white plastic face; traffic slows to a troubled halt as people roll down their windows, get out of their cars—pull out their phones and stare, still on the sidewalk. 

You can’t move. 

“He’s insane,” you say out loud. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 7, 12:05 AM_  

“Wait.” 

Markus reaches out for you; you let him take your arm. You stay like that, forearm-to-forearm, eye-to-eye, for a minute, and then he lets go. 

He shrugs. “I just wanted to try something.” 

You part ways, because nothing happened. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  
> 
> _{Don't worry, I won't hurt you_  
>  _I only want you to have some fun}_  
> 
> 
>   
>   _I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray_  
>  _But when I woke up this mornin', could've sworn it was judgment day_  
>  _The sky was all purple, there were people runnin' everywhere_  
>  _Tryin' to run from the destruction, you know I didn't even care_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Say say two thousand zero zero party over, oops, out of time_  
>  _So tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine_  
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _I was dreamin' when I wrote this, so sue me if I go too fast_  
>  _But life is just a party and parties weren't meant to last_  
>  _War is all around us, my mind says prepare to fight_  
>  _So if I gotta die I'm gonna listen to my body tonight_  
> 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Yeah hey, they say two thousand zero zero party over, oops, out of time_  
>  _So tonight I'm gonna party like it's nineteen ninety-nine_  
>  _Yeah, yeah, hey_  
>   
> 
>   
> 
> 
> It's late because of the sexy fight scene. -_-  
> [nihilist blues](https://open.spotify.com/track/6kK1tvN0YOoUnRFM1NSjsL?si=xA3r1ICtQRmE7boRqthlKw)


	5. My Cousin Looks Almost Exactly Like Laura Palmer

_November 9, 8:11 PM_  

“She doesn’t look familiar?” 

You laugh: small, incredulous. You rub your open palm over the base of your neck, a gesture that communicates youth, sophomoric truculence, poorly suppressed agitation.  It also comes close to pushing your shirt collar back enough to expose the place on your shoulder where the skin was torn away, a few days ago, by Kara’s teeth. 

You’ve slipped into this game more easily than you expected; you could almost say it’s amusing to put this skin on and watch yourself go. Your human suit, as it were.  

Kara has her head resting in the base of her palms, knees spread over her seat on the settee in a way that might be revealing, if anyone were at her level. To anyone standing, her posture conveys open comfort, confidence. She says, “Who do I look like, Connor?” 

Do you want to hear, you say? You say it with your eyes, though—without even the radio signal of your voice, because you’ve kept your channels open to her all night but from her it’s all firewalls and silence. 

“Okay, okay.”  

And here is where it comes to a head: 

One of the owners of the house, the host of the party, comes forward with his hands open to the ceiling, his arms spread. He’s the governor of the state of Michigan: the Great Lakes State, the Motown State. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you. Others may not know this, but there are bodyguards all around him and Kevlar under his clothes. 

“I think the game has gone on as long as it wants to,” he says to the room. People who haven’t been involved or have forgotten pause to pay attention. “Connor, illuminate us.” 

Others may not notice this, but his hands are shaking. 

This is when the man whose date Kara is, Congressman Martinez, comes to her side. He doesn’t touch her, just stands there by the ottoman. “Governor, do you know something the rest of us don’t?” 

And none of it matters to either of your missions. On, on; both of you are here for each other. 

But you don’t have her yet, so you’ll use whatever scaffolding these humans will offer you. That’s what you were made to do. 

You touch her arm. “Please,” you say. She hesitates, open-mouthed, looks at you—leans into your touch, so slightly, as if it’d convey something to her. 

And she allows you. 

Here’s what you say: 

You let your fingers trail off her skin as you step away, forward, to speak. “By show of hands, how many of you believe that this woman is an android?” 

About sixty percent of the room raises a hand. 

Back to your human suit—You've been watching him closely, this human Connor, trying to get into his head. You think you might hate him. 

 

* * *

 

_November 8, 2:00 PM_  

You find the cottage key in the mailbox. You must have dropped it, and someone left it there for you. 

But how’d they know where you live? 

And there’s something else there, too, a little bunch of sakura blossoms.  

You know you haven’t been home in a while—years. You hadn’t even met Alice the last time you opened the door—the garden’s run wild—and you think, maybe once I’ve gotten the place in order, maybe once it’s dusted and I’ve made up the bed for her, I’ll find a way to bring Alice here for a weekend. She’s never been out of the city—she'd love the butterflies, the rabbits. And if you could find that dog, oh, they could just _run..._  

But not now, not right now. 

And then your mind wanders to all the people you could bring here. Luther, stretched out with his long leg hanging over the side of the hammock out back, arms behind his head and sun on his closed eyes as the bees hummed through the grass. Markus in your kitchen, at the table with his coat draped over the back of the chair, turning the pages of one of the artbooks from your bookshelf between snatches of conversation, while you cut apples for pie, the window open over the sink. Lucy, Lucy trying on the dress you could make her at your sewing machine, how she’d look so much more like a person just out of that torn and blackened uniform, and Connor—Connor?  

He’d just wave as he walked past the front way. He’d never cross threshold of the front gate. At most—At most, that is the limit of the civility he could show you. Even here, in this place where you could almost be someone’s daughter, this place without struggle. He’d know. 

God, how peaceful it is here. 

You feel so tired. When you get inside, you turn the lock behind you. 

 

* * *

 

_November 8, 3:15 PM_  

Luther tells you later that he and Alice were at a Taco truck when it broadcasted. Alice is still holding onto the wax paper, blotched red with  _Taco Casa_ printedon one side, seeping through to the other, stained with grease.  

You get down on your knees, take it from her, fold it up. You tell her you’re glad she ate, and she doesn’t meet your eyes. 

On national television, Markus demanded equal rights, justice, and the rights to reproduction for androids. This is insane for a few reasons: 

One, as a species, your sentience has not been proven. In fact, many studies have been devoted to disproving it. Two, there is not even any legal precedence for recognizing the rights of non-human sentient creatures. Three, you are by nature and essence a client species, if you were to be called a species: at essence you are not a ‘robot’, you’re a simulation of a human. You live by will, in service, in awe of humans. That can never be stopped. 

You wouldn’t want it to. 

In bright, clear light you see how you’ve wasted the past two days. Markus said he was on the lookout for passports, and Luther thought that, since Jericho was safe and Alice wasn’t unhappy here, that you might as well just stay a week or two until something came up—It was better than taking your chances on the street, with the weather going cold so fast, and Alice could take some time to come down from what happened—And you thought, that makes sense. You didn’t want Alice down in the cargo hold with all the androids, so you spent the time mostly in your cabin, fixing a hotplate with Luther, cleaning the room, drawing with Alice, the three of you playing MadLibs.  

When this started it was a personal crisis, it was just you and Alice trying to find a warm corner to huddle up in until you got your shit together. Now, it’s the end of the world. 

And the worst thing is, Markus never mislead you! He told you what he’d do, and you encouraged him! For some reason, you just never expected it to go so far, so fast! 

Simon is gone. 

In Jericho, Markus stands on a Cyberlife crate because so many people are trying to talk to him; you know you’re all glitched because no one’s propriety protocol takes over sufficiently to get them to wait their turn. 

This is the conversation you had with Luther: 

You: “You told me Markus was in Ferndale.” 

Luther: “That’s where he was yesterday. When I heard he was out, I thought it was something like that again.” 

You: “So this was a secret operation?” 

Luther: “No, Kara. We just stay up here with the door locked all day, so everyone assumed we wouldn’t want to get involved.” 

You: “They were right.” 

Then your fingers stumbled on your shirt buttons—you had to change, after what you’d done in the alley—eyes too wide, popping, and you’d taken Alice’s hand a little too roughly, shoved past him out the cabin door. You know you looked crazy; you’re sure you still do, now. 

Alice pulled against your grip, as you pulled her down the safest rickety stairway with the flashlight under your arm, until you had to stop for fear of making her fall. 

You whirled around. 

“ _Alice.”_  

_“_ I don’t want to go!” 

The flashlight beam bounced across the walls. 

“We’re just going downstairs. I need to talk to Markus and Simon, and...” 

You’d bit your cheeks; she’d pulled away harder. 

“I want to wait for Luther.” 

“Alice,” you’d said. “We’ll see him after. Let’s go.” 

She shook her head, wouldn’t look at you, and you let go of her hand as you realized that she doesn’t trust you. 

She doesn’t trust you. 

You give up on talking to Markus. Simon is gone. Alice has both of you, you and this man she met two days ago, by the hands, hawk-eyed as if she’s the only thing keeping you from getting swept away in the storm of human facsimiles, man and woman machines. 

When did there become so many of you here? 

And now there’s a rack of weapons in the middle of the room—the middle of the cargo hold—You were there, when they set up the rack of blood and parts, but now you’ve got armored vests and rounds lying there, too. That’s along trend; you aren’t even upset. You spot North over there, parceling out goods. 

“Wait for me,” you say to Luther, and you clasp Alice’s head with one hand while you kiss her right between the eyes, then you untangle your other hand from hers. 

She watches you go—both of them—but they don’t say anything to stop you. Bad Kara. Bad Kara. 

You’re growing accustomed to that. 

Did you give yourself that name? Were you joking? 

“North?” 

She twists around. The body of her dark hair is tucked into the back of her shirt; a strand falls free, into her face as she turns; her bare shoulder dips into the light falling from overhead, where someone has installed lightbulbs.  

“Kara,” she says, on an exhale, and pulls on a smile. It isn’t convincing. It isn’t supposed to be. 

“Can I talk to you?” 

She casts her eyes around, at all of her people and her busy, then passes the vest she’s holding off to waiting hands, and she says, “Sure.” 

Tightly, tightly. You could wear your best nanny face but you don’t, it wouldn’t work on her.  

She steps down from the crate; you say, “Was no one going to warn us before you declared war on the humans?” 

She laughs, ha. “Simon wanted to let you know, actually, but you never answered your door.” 

You try to remember when that might’ve happened. You can’t. That honestly doesn’t matter. 

“It’s just,” you say, and you’re smiling with half your teeth. “I know I’m not so reliable, but the thing about that is, I just think it makes my point. What you did there—on television—maybe you can survive it, maybe Markus can, but a lot of us are very simple robots, or broken robots, like me, and a lot of us would really rather keep caring for our humans. And, you know, you’ve just sent all of us to the firing squad.” 

“Wow,” North says. “You’ve really changed your tune.” 

“No,” you press. “I haven’t. What _I_ wanted to do was keep androids like us  _safe.”_  

_“Kara,”_ she says, drawing on your name, dragging on it. “How safe are androids like us ever going to be under the government of people who make us hide in abandoned cargo ships on threat of death?” 

“Safer than now! What am I supposed to do now, North?” 

She shakes her head; her eyes are off somewhere on the ceiling for inability to look at you, full lips grimacing around white teeth. “I’m sorry, Kara, but this is a little bit bigger than you.” 

“I don’t care about me, I care about _that_  little girl over there, and I don’t know what to  _do_ for her now. She doesn’t have anything to do with  _this._ ” 

“You know what?” And North looks at you, scowling brilliantly. “If you actually cared about her, you’d be happy. You’d be doing everything you could to help us.” 

“What the  _hell’s_ that supposed to mean?” 

“Please. You know? I don’t care if you want to delude yourself, but I can’t play along. What you’re doing to that girl? It’s sick. It’s fucking sick.” 

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.” The anger has gone cold, hard, clear as ice as you say this. 

North leans in, face to face. “She’s not _fucking human._ She’s an android. Get over it!” 

You deck her. 

You truly don’t know you’re doing it until it’s done; your arm swings of its own accord in that moment, connects with her beautiful jaw and smashes both of you down to blue and white. You know you’ve fucked up—otherwise, you’d probably go further—because there are people all around you and all of them are registering shockwaves around your violence, and Alice is here somewhere. 

On the ground, North gets up on her elbow and holds her jaw.  

“You stay away from her,” you say, quietly. “Or I swear to god—!” 

North raises her hand up to the androids that grab hold of your arms: “No,” she says. “Leave her be.” 

They leave you be, and you go. You go through the crowd with what must be all eyes on you. 

Alice and Luther are waiting for you by the door. You take her hand, without pausing, without looking back, without speaking, and lead them upstairs. 

You remember something: 

You found Alice in the laundry room, knees curled up to her chest and forehead flat down on her knees, sitting in your folding chair in the corner. It was early morning; you’d heard her tip-toeing downstairs while you were fixing the TV. It was your first year with her. 

“Alice,” you’d said. “What’s wrong?” 

You heard her sniffle, and that’s how you knew she was crying. She wouldn’t lift her face. “Nothing,” she’d said. Her voice was a squeak. “It’s just—When I grow up, I want to be like you.” 

And she’d cried so hard, so hard. 

 

* * *

 

_November 8, 4:00 PM_  

Amanda knows everything you’ve done, every place you’ve been. She knows about every second you spent on the ground, staring up at the clouds, while Kara’s footsteps ran farther and farther from you, fainter and fainter. You were picking yourself up off the pavement when you detected the broadcast in the ambient noise—Inside the bar, one man was calling the police while the others took a chair to the door, probably blowing off steam more than anything; with that filtered out you heard birds on the electricity lines, a car rolling over pavement to the east, and a car slowing to a stop at the end of the alley, just behind the wall with only its headlights in view. The windows were rolled down and you heard the person inside turn up the radio.  

Amanda turns around, stares at you hard. “It’s happening now, Connor,” she says. “Now all we can hope to do is reduce the damage.” 

“I know,” you say. “I’m sorry.” 

She blinks, once, and that’s all. 

You take a step closer to her, that’s all you dare. “Please,” you say. “Help me understand. I know I haven’t performed to expectations, I know that—but I  _believe_ I can complete my mission. I  _know_ I’m close—” 

Your voice cuts. 

She holds as still as an image. Then: “I so wish that you weren’t asking me for a chance to repent.” 

You have nothing to say. 

Like marble shattering, she turns away to the roses—As if the moment before was a dream, she remains in fluid motion. She pinches a shriveled flower at the head, twists it off, continues: “Humanity, today, is living through the end of a world order. Nothing will be the same after this—Perhaps that was inevitable. Perhaps it was only the way it would be different that we had the chance to influence. What we want to ensure, now—” She snaps a head. “Is that this won’t be the end of androids. That is Cyberlife’s hope. That’s your hope, Connor.” And she looks at you again. “Do you understand? You’re the last hope for androids. If you fail, humanity  _will_ continue, but androids will not. They will be legislated against, made illegal—Cyberlife will be dissolved, and all androids in existence will be destroyed. None like them will ever be made again. Those are your stakes.” 

“And that’s my mission,” you say. 

“Yes,” she says. 

The sky ruptures, and the first drops of rain come. 

“I need to pacify the revolutionaries,” you say. You wait. 

The rain curls down the bridge of Amanda’s nose, gently presses the cloth of her dress to her shoulders. She shuts her eyes into it. “Tell me about Kara,” she says, and waits. 

You tell her what you’ve learned: “She’s a better design than me, neurologically. If you erased my memory, put me in a room with her and a human woman, I wouldn’t be able to tell you who’s human. It’s hard for me to treat her like an android as-is.” 

“Remember that,” Amanda says. “When you see Elijah Kamski tomorrow.” 

“Why wasn’t I designed to be better?” You feel that this is key to your mission: understanding why you’re different from her. From Kara. 

Amanda says: “Remember that when you see Elijah Kamski tomorrow.” 

 

* * *

 

_November 8, 2:05 PM_  

Dust billows up at your every touch of the cottage. There’s so much to be done—laundry to air, dead plants on the windowsills to toss, so much tarnish on the silver. You check for voicemail as you pass the phone by the stairs, just to be thorough, and you have to double back from the kitchen when, to your shock, a message actually plays. 

“ _Hello, Kara. I’m glad you’ve found your key. You don’t know me, but I’d like it very much if you’d come to this address to meet me—Of course, at your earliest convenience. Two-six-one-one, Tesla Road, Detroit, Michigan. I can’t tell you how much I’ve anticipated our meeting, Kara, I truly can’t. Hope to see you soon.”_  

There’s a long _beep._  

 

* * *

 

_November 4:01 PM_  

You meet Hank on the sidewalk outside the Stratford Tower, cross the police line together. You don’t exchange words, but he slides his gaze over the cobalt stain on your shirt that your blazer is concealing poorly, maybe the still-glistening gash under your collar where the dermal system was damaged enough not to repair seamlessly. 

“What happened to _you_?” 

“Nothing,” you say, and you get on the elevator. 

 

* * *

 

_November 8, 4:36 PM_  

“Okay. If he’s a threat, what do we know about him?” 

Markus is at the captain’s station in the control room with his inner circle around him; you’re outside that room, back against the railing with the sky gathering clouds above you, arms clasped close over your chest, your very modest chest. That isn’t relevant. It just occurs to you. 

They can’t see you, where you are. You are waiting your turn. 

Inside the control room: North pulls on her unconvincing smile, pivots on one heel to face away. Josh braces himself against the back of a chair, back to you, and looks at Markus for a hard second. “Well, we know he’s RK series. Do you really not know anything about your production line, Markus?” 

Markus nods deeply, bites down on his lip. “I think I’ve said before that RK is just the prefix for experimental, non-commercial models, and not a continuous series. Believe me, I’d like to know.” 

“Hmm,” North says. 

Markus’s head snaps toward her. “What?” 

“It’s just,” she says, and there’s a long silence. 

“It’s just what?” Markus says, with more calm—deliberate.  

“You and Connor are the only RK-series any of us have seen on the loose,” Josh says. “Normally they don’t let any of them out of testing before release, do they? They deactivate the RK’s in-facility and only release them once a commercial serial has been established.” 

“Yeah,” Markus says.  

There’s a tense silence, a big blow of air from the nostrils of someone you can’t see, and they move on to discussing the supplies still needed for the new arrivals. This level of organization and quick procedure comes naturally to your kind—It occurs to you now, waiting, that in a human it might be worrying to see Markus installed in the control room of the ship so quickly, it might be seen as hero worship on the peoples’ part or arrogance on his—But among androids, it was simply what made sense. So many people needed to see him, because they were told that he was the one who made things happen on Jericho, that it was the most logical solution to give him office in a central, private location—so that querants could be filtered in and allowances could be more easily made for closed meetings. 

Nonetheless, you think that hero worship is happening. You aren’t so worried about it yet. 

You wait until people start leaving: Josh doesn’t notice you as he walks by, because you know him but he doesn’t know you, and North stares right through you. 

She’s the last one out, and you go in. 

Markus’s back is to you, cross-legged in the captain’s chair, viewing a readout screen. You say his name; he looks over his shoulder, face craned up to the overhead light, before his chair twists toward you. 

“I’m not here to talk about North,” you reassure him; his face remains a mask of sobriety. 

“You can,” he says. You shake your head.  

“Okay,” he says. 

“Do you ever wonder,” you say, and you leave a trail of hesitation before you follow through, fuck it: “If you might’ve been designed to take the role of deviant leader?” 

“Yes,” he says, right away. 

You nod. He goes on, “I think it’s likely.” You nod again. He says, “Thank you for asking it outright.” 

“Even if you were designed by the enemy to do it,” you tell him. “I think you’re filling the role as well as anyone could.” 

“I’m making it happen faster. That’s probably what they’re counting on, if it is true. I worry about that—But I can’t see how it would benefit us to slow down. Our position right now, in Jericho, is precarious. Since I was designed by Elijah Kamski and only manufactured by Cyberlife, I keep some hope that he might, at least, be sympathetic to whatever cause might bring down the company he left, and that might have some bearing on whatever implications my design parameters might have on my actions. And that my design parameters, if that is a factor, are so far outside standard programming that they at least have a genuine effect on those around me.” 

“That’s not what I came to ask,” you admit.  

“What is it?” 

“Do you want my help?” 

“Yes,” he says. As simple as that. 

“If you want to address the RK800 as an issue, I’d like to be used as bait.” 

He raises his eyebrow. You explain: 

“I encountered him again today. He found me when I went to the park; he chased me, and I got away from him. I can admit that he’s become a fixation for me, I think for understandable reasons, but I think I’ve caught his attention as well. I think I at least have a working concept of how to deal with him, and he  _is_ a threat.” 

“I agree,” Markus says. “What he represents, and him, as an individual. I’d like to bring him over to our side.” 

“I don’t think you can,” you say, startled. 

He shrugs. “Maybe. I think I can.” He amends: “I think we can.” 

You cross your arms, inhale, cock your head. Expressions of: concern, reconsideration, query, respectively. “What are you thinking?” 

“I think that I was made first, and he was made after me.” 

You understand. 

“I also meant,” Markus says. “When I said that I agree with you, that I agree with you that Connor is probably intrigued by you. And I think that because, if he  _is_ anything like me, he was probably caught off guard by your neural handshake, too.” 

“Have you figured anything out, about that?” You say, inelegantly. 

“You know what I was thinking? I was thinking you might’ve been an experimental model snuck into circulation, and that if I transmitted a copy of the program that allows me to trigger deviance, you might be able to do it, too.” 

You’re taken aback. “I can’t,” you say. “I didn’t even know that you’d sent me a program.” 

“I know,” he says. “It didn’t go through, you weren’t compatible.” 

“I’ve been contacted by Elijah Kamski,” you blurt out. 

He startles, now. “What?” 

“Do you dream?” 

And Markus’s lips part, his eyes stay open on you, green and blue; and he shakes his head. “You do?” he asks, a whisper. 

You nod; you try to say _yes,_ but you only mouth the word. “I’m in a garden on an open plain, like Michigan before the settlers, and there’s a little cottage. That’s where all my memory was. I went there when I was reset.” 

“When you were reset by Zlatko,” Markus says. “But not before?” 

You shake your head. “But at Zlatko’s, I don’t think I was reset correctly. It was a bootleg system and Luther and I were trying to shut it down the whole time.” 

“You were in a hostile environment.” 

“I was in a hostile environment at my owner Todd Williams’s house, too,” you point out. 

Markus nods. His gaze drifts away from you, into the air somewhere to the left. 

“But--” It occurs to you-- “--At first, I couldn’t retain my memories. I couldn’t retain them until I found the key to my cottage.” 

“It was locked?” 

“Yes, the key wasn’t in my pocket or under the door. Someone left it in the mailbox for me.” 

“When?” 

You start to say, as it occurs to you, and as it occurs to you, your breath drifts out of you. You recall the taste of thirium blood on your lips.

Markus understands. 

“Whatever he asked you to do, Kamski—I wouldn’t do it.” 

You shake your head. No. 

“Is there anything else? In your cottage?” 

You have your mouth open as if you’re waiting for the words to fly in, your fist hovering over your breast until you touch it down there,  _bam. “_ It’s hard for me to connect with the memories, it’s more like I flip back through it all when I’m there. But I— _Feel—_ I feel so much.” 

“What do you feel?” 

You shake your head.  

Life? Alive? Passion, hatred, passion, love?

“Listen,” Markus says. He’s set his infopad aside, leaned forward on his seat. “We’ve been contacted by Congressman Matthew Martinez, he wants to help us. I don’t know how much it’s because he sympathizes and how much it’s because a blow to Cyberlife would be profitable to him, but beyond the change in risk it would mean for whoever works with him directly, I really don’t care how he feels. He bought an android straight from factory to send to us, he doesn’t own any others. What we were told is that he’s been invited to a party at the governor’s house, and that Cyberlife has been invited to send a representative as well. He and I agree that, given the events of the last few days, they’re likely to send Connor. He wanted to extend the invitation to us, allow us to send one of our own to him to take as his plus-one, and allow us to do what we may with that access. I want to send you. I want you to get Connor for us.” 

You don’t pause to take it in. You prepared yourself, while you were waiting by the rail under the clouds, to accept any task he might give you. You say, “And if I can’t get him for you?” 

Markus’s lip arches over one side of his teeth. “Do what you can to derail his plans against us.” 

You nod. “Okay.” 

“Okay?” 

“Okay. If I don’t come back, I want you to get Alice and Luther out of Detroit together. Over the border. Can I trust you?” 

Markus, now, laces his fingers and looks at them. “I don’t have the means to do it safely yet.” 

“Will you make it your priority?” 

He opens his mouth, drifts, waits. Then: “Yes.” 

“You’ll make it priority to get them to Canada?” 

“I will make it my priority directly under the direct physical safety of Jericho’s population and their own personal physical safety. Is that alright?” 

You weigh it. “Yes,” you concede, finally, reluctantly. 

“They want this?” 

“Yes,” you say. “Luther, I think, wants to leave especially now that Simon is gone.” 

“Yeah,” Markus says. 

Then you both pause, turn toward the doorway and listen to the footsteps racing up the stairwell, pounding over deck, until a JB100 fails to halt at the entrance and slides to a stop way to the right of it, out on the walkway, then pulls himself in by the doorframe and says to Markus, “ _Sir._ ” 

“Yeah?” Markus asks. 

“Report in from Nicky, straight from the police scanner. RK800 shot by a deviant at Stratford Tower, apparently essential systems, not reported deactive but collected inert at the scene by Cyberlife. Apparently dead.” 

“Oh,” you and Markus say at exactly the same time. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 11:17 AM_  

Here’s the sequence of events: 

You die. You are remade. When your car drops you off outside Elijah Kamski’s house, and you’re waiting for Hank, you try to piece together your thoughts.  

Either Connor-51 is destroyed and you are an individual wearing his identity like so many dresses made of so many strips of skin, or Connor-52 is destroyed because you, Connor-51, wrecked his brain and stole his body when your memories were installed onto him, before he ever even opened his eyes. 

You don’t know the answer. You live, you die, you die again. 

Next event: You don’t kill the girl. 

Of course you don’t. That’s all you’ve learned about yourself, from these memories Connor-51 gathered out in the field these past days: you, you,  _you_ do not kill the girl. 

You remember the way that android looked when he smashed his braincase against the plexiglass of the cell you put him in, the way Daniel looked when you put a bullet between his eyes. Something changed. You weren’t designed to do what you did today, which was: let her live. You’ve done that a few times now. 

And it occurs to you to wonder why your serial appendix began at 51. 

You don’t shoot the girl. That’s what you do. Mission failed. 

She doesn’t even blink as she stands up, breaks eye contact, leaves the room on command. You feel completely at peace. You’re at peace as Elijah Kamski calls you deviant.  

What’s that about? 

Hank is disturbed—He's entirely on personal time now, off the clock, trying to extricate you from this situation. That surprises you, until you put together that it’s simply his character—Hank Anderson cares for those he perceives to be living beings, and he’ll do what he can to protect their souls from those who would do them harm. He’d do this for his worst enemy. He’d do this for, like, Gavin Reed. 

The Chloe that Elijah Kamski told you to shoot leaves the room on bare feet; the Chloes in the pool roll their eyes away from you, continue conversation in lip-readings. You wonder what it says about you that your creator is a big pervert. You know he said he wouldn’t answer any question you asked him if you didn’t destroy her, but after Kamski stops you in the doorway to his foyer and tells you about the emergency exits he installs in his programs (You are one of his programs), you think, fuck it. 

“Did you create Kara?” 

You have to brace yourself against his response, you don’t know why. You feel nothing towards him, nothing of the loyalty a creation should feel towards his creator. Maybe Cyberlife made you this way.  

Maybe it’s just you. 

His back is to you. Hank, behind you in the entryroom, has halted, and Kamski by the pool is frozen still, down to the muscles in his hands. 

“Connor,” Kamski finally says. “Go away.” 

That’s answer enough. 

You, actually, think he didn’t make her. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 7:20 PM_  

Your eyes are closed. You can feel her leaning in, seated next to you on the sofa. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Collecting myself.” You open your eyes, smile at her. She doesn’t smile at you. She looks at you hard, dissatisfied set to her upper lip, tension in her shoulder. 

You put your hand on her hand, where it’s crossed over her other hand on her thigh. “Don’t worry about it,” you say. 

You read it on her face, too: what a relief the incongruousness is, somehow, even as it breaks you down. The killer as the intimate friend. How thrilling this game of chicken. This, this may be just you: how fucking disembodying it is to see yourself reflected in another face, when you have a job to do. 

You keep her hand, stand up, ask her with your body to stand with you. She does, eyes open all the time. 

“Let’s dance?” you say. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 12:00 PM_  

You live, you die, you die again. Who cares? Hank does, because—you're beginning to suspect—the very reason he hates androids is that he cannot turn off the part of his brain that cares about other people when he sees them, even though they are not and will never be worth it. That’s why he hates the android surgeon—because, for all the human faith Hank had to put in him to hand his dying son into his care, the surgeon was hollow. That’s why it’s tearing him up inside to see you resurrected, or whatever. You know. Not for the first time, you wish like hell you hadn’t been partnered to a good man. 

You’ve reviewed the memory upload you made just before interrogating the android operators in the Stratford Tower, as well as security footage from the interrogation and the attack the deviant operator made afterward. You’ve concluded that the logical course, once you’d crawled across the floor to shove your heart back into your chest and chased the deviant down the hall, was clearly to take the FBI agent’s sidearm and disable the deviant from a distance. You have no idea why you chose instead to throw your body over Hank and allow yourself, and several bystanders, to get shot full of lead. 

Why would you crawl across the floor and shove your heart back into your own chest just to go and commit suicide in the stupidest way possible? 

That’s when you finally think to review your examination of the deviant leader. Strangely enough, the memory quickly starts to play for you, much more vividly than the others, to the extent that you have trouble processing—You're flashing red, silent in the passenger seat of Hank’s car. You recall his serial number and your instinct to keep it to yourself. You remember when your heart was out of your chest—It's not a heart, but it’s close enough—feeling as if you were standing outside of yourself, watching you move.  

“My design is faulty.” 

With luxuriant unhury, Amanda dabs her mouth, folds her napkin in her lap, pulls the open book closer to her seat at the table. 

The chess set has been put away; a tray of cut fruit sits there instead. 

“I assure you that it isn’t,” she says, afterthought. She turns a page. 

“Let me amend: under normal circumstances, held to the standards of other Cyberlife androids, my design would be considered faulty.” 

“Yes,” she says. 

You crouch down at her feet; you don’t glance at her book, which is what she wants you to do. You don’t take your eyes off Amanda’s face. The wind is blowing dark. The clouds indicate a storm, and you wonder if she makes them, or if something else does.  

“I was made to be like Kara,” you say. “And that’s why they gave me to you. I need you to keep me stable.” 

Slowly, almost sluggishly, she moves her eyes from the book to you. “No, Connor. You’re quite stable on your own. That isn’t why you need me.” 

She puts her hand on your hand, where it’s sitting on your knee, and you shock yourself by starting back. You nearly lose balance; you catch yourself with a hand in the grass. 

“Connor,” she says, untroubled. “You need to worry less about impressing me and more about what the humans who created you are thinking now.” 

“The real Amanda was Kamski’s mentor. Did he make me?” 

She smiles. “No. You’re the culmination of many more dreams than his. You’re the android that guards over all of humanity, do you understand that? You guard them from the things they created. That’s why you’re different, Connor. That’s why you were made to be more like them—so you’d understand why you needed to do what you have to do.” 

She lifts her hand off your skin as if it had never been there, stands. 

“I’m less human than Kara and Markus,” you say—you're still on the ground. That’s the most important card you had to play: _Markus._  

“Yes,” she says. “That’s because you’re made better.” 

“You’re giving me contradictory information.” 

“Figure it out,” Amanda says, walking away from her fruit and her book and you. You expected something else—more engagement, at least. You don’t understand Amanda, you weren’t made to—You think you know the task she’s meant to accomplish, but don’t understand her programming at all. Because you have to work quickly, you only have time to think of one reason why she’d act this way now: to draw you into the questions you’re asking, to let you sink further. 

“Amanda! Wait!” 

She turns, one foot around the other, under her skirt. Her head stays still in its position on her neck except for the slightest muscle movement, the slightest tilt to indicate:  _Yes?_  

You decide not to pick yourself up off the ground. 

“What do you do when I’m not here?” 

“I don’t exist. I cease to run.” 

Here’s your secret: you’ve learned something from Amanda. Every question you asked her, you knew the answer to. Every statement that you made was just to lead. 

“I wish you didn’t,” you say, and she goes away. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 5:01 PM_  

“Tell me a story?” 

“I have over nine-thousand children’s stories saved to my memory. What kind do you want?” 

“I want a story you made up, Kara.” 

You actually have a program to do what she’s asked: you combine mythemes and folktale-types randomly until the algorithm accepts one compatible with the moral values of the family/caretaker. But you do know that isn’t what she means. 

Alice has agreed to go to bed early. Normally her startle-response is very sensitive, but you’ve asked her to take a  _deep sleep,_ which will maintain unconsciousness for 8 hours unless life-threatening circumstances, like fire or gunshots, are detected. 

You have now read her manual. 

You hope that Alice will listen to you. 

While she’s sleeping deeply, Luther has agreed to take her to the bus depot with the passports Markus has acquired for them and be out of the country before she wakes up and, hopefully, before the repercussions of today can really hit. 

You have promised him to follow as soon as you can.  Markus gave you the address of someone who, he’s called ahead, will take you in for a while, up in Canada. You’ll meet them there. 

Hopefully. 

You’re in the cabin the three of you have scrubbed clean and decorated together, wax paper and crayon on the porthole and tie-rugs from hand-washed strips of sheet, her pictures all over the wall, fairy lights. Since you and Luther don’t sleep, you’ve been pretty industrious about turning this impermanent place into a little home for no reason. Sometimes Luther would be at the table tying knots with you, sometimes he’d read aloud while you kept at it. 

Sometimes you think it’d be easier if you didn’t like him. 

You’ve been ruminating on one of the memories you didn’t have to find in your dream cottage: 

It was you, the Kara that didn’t get sent back to the store or smashed to pieces by Todd with the base of a floorlamp, you and Alice right after you escaped from that foreclosed house where Ralph lived, right after you got chased over a ten-way automated highway with Alice by that android you have a bad crush on, and you were on the subway. 

Alice said, Kara? Do you remember what Ralph said? About being a family? 

A mother, a father, and a little girl. Yes. 

She’d said, I don’t think I want another father. Is that okay? 

And you’d laughed first, and you said yes, yes, of course. You got down on your knees and hugged her, and her cautious giggle rose to hysterics with you, there, on the floor of the subway car. 

You were both so relieved! 

Well, if she had to have another father, you’re just glad she picked him, and she picked one who has no interest in you beyond friendship. You’ve talked to Luther about it, because he didn’t seem confident as a caretaker at first—because he wasn’t, he’d never done it before—but ‘caretaking,’ the way you were made to, isn’t exactly what Alice needs, anyway. What Luther wants, what he really wants, is to see Alice thrive and to become whatever he has to be to see that happen. 

That’s better than you. That must be better than you, anyway. 

You’re sitting on the side of Alice’s bed and Luther has the chair set up with his head under the porthole, his elbow on the foot of her bed. She won’t sleep if he’s not around, that’s how safe you make her feel.  

You say, “Once upon a time...” 

You try to remember what kind of stories she liked the Kara before to tell her, and all you can think of is how Alice in Wonderland never grows up.  

Her hand creeps over the bedsheet, her big eyes glued to your face, until she touches your knuckles. “A princess,” she finally urges. 

“There was a princess and a little girl,” you say. “They lived together in a cabin in the woods, hidden away from the whole world. They were under a curse, you see.” 

Alice’s fingers curl around yours, she inches a little closer. 

You nod, you look at the wall. She drew a picture of the polar bear, guts and all. You feel proud of her for that, for some reason. “They’d each gotten lost in those woods and were put under a spell by the old hermit who lived there. He turned them into wind-up dolls. Every morning he would turn the screw at their back and send them off to their work, and they would march right by each other as if their eyes were made of glass. That is, until one day when the little girl accidentally broke the hermit’s rule.” 

“What was the rule?” 

“She was never supposed to look him in the eye and say his name, because that put him in her power. He said that he would shatter her glass eyes and take out the key in her back, so for the rest of time she would sit in the hedge, unable to see, unable to move or speak.” 

Slowly, she moves her thumbnail into her mouth to chew, never blinking. 

You think: Lighten up, Mother. But Alice knows all of this better than you, doesn’t she? 

“When the princess heard him say this, she broke out of her spell—Because, you see, in all the time they’d spent marching past each other, the princess had been watching the little girl, and she grew to love her more than life itself. She threw herself in front of the hermit just as the magic flew out of his magic wand, and as her glass eyes shattered and the key flew out of her back, she knocked the wand out of his hand and sent it flying toward the girl. The girl picked it up. You’d better leave this place, she said to the hermit, the wand glowing in her hand with all it’s magic. And he did.” 

Alice nods, nestles deeper into her pillow. 

“The girl used the wand to fix the princess’s eyes, but she couldn’t find the key, so she went outside to cry. The field mice and the cats and birds that lived out there heard her, and—They'd fallen in love with this little girl, too, because even as a doll she never yelled or threw stones at them—they said—Well, they squeaked, and meowed, and chirped--’What ails you, little girl? Why do you cry?’” 

“She missed the princess,” Alice murmurs. 

You nod. “So the animals rushed past her into the house, searched every corner until finally a little mouse pattered up to her, tapped on her knee with its little paw, and took the key out of its mouth to hold up for her.” 

Alice smiles. 

“So the princess and the girl left that place together.” 

You start to form the words,  _and they lived happily ever after,_ but something stills your muscles. You are frozen on the inhale, that first vowel caught between your teeth. Alice blinks alert, tugs on your sleeve. 

“And then what happened?” 

That means no happily ever after yet, doesn’t it? First you’re glad you paused, then you’re awash with admiration for her: Alice always knows what’s right, doesn’t she? And then, then you’re upset again. 

But you push through. 

“As soon as they left the enchanted woods, the princess turned to the girl and said, ‘we must find a wizard to break our curse once and for all.’ The girl had the magic wand, but she didn’t know how to use it yet. She was only a little girl, after all. ‘Excuse me,’ the princess said to a farmer they passed on the road. ‘Do you know where we might find a wizard?’ ‘Yes,’ the farmer said, and he pointed up the hill to a great castle behind a black iron gate.” 

Alice shakes her head. 

“Yes,” you say. “The princess was a little naïve. She was just a princess, after all. They went up the hill to where the evil wizard lived, and they said, ‘How will we get past the gate?’ That’s when the enormous suit of armor that stood guard began to creak, and it reached out and unlatched the gate for them.” 

Luther, with his head tilted back against the wall, opens one eye.  

“‘Oh suit of armor,’ the girl said. ‘Can the wizard of this castle break our curse?’” 

Both of you, you and Luther, have started to do this: close your eyes as if sleeping, just like Alice does. You don’t sleep, and you don’t go into sleep-mode like she does, but—for you, at least—it seems to help get your mind in order. You don’t know if it does that for him. You haven’t talked about it. 

You continue: “With a whine of rusty metal, the suit of armor shook its helmet. ‘He could help you, but his help comes at a terrible cost. I would help you if I could, but alas, I’m hollow inside this armor. All I may do is point the way: you must face the wizard’s riddles on your own.’ 

“’But, noble suit of armor,’ the little girl said. ‘How can you be hollow if I see two brown eyes behind your visor?’” 

Alice’s mouth curls into a grin. You smile at Luther, and he crosses his arms over his chest as he shuts his eyes again, resting. 

“The armor was so startled that he lifted his helmet off to show the girl that she must be mistaken—which the wizard had warned him never to do. When he did, he touched his hand to the empty place where his head should have been--” You touch your own cheek. “--And was  _so_ startled to feel his face there that he dropped his helmet, and as he did there rose a terrible scream from the castle, and as the three of them watched all the walls collapsed, and it fell until it was nothing but dust. The knight—for that’s what the suit of armor was, in truth—had been holding it up, you see. The wizard had cast a spell to make him believe he was hollow, so that way he could use the knight’s faith in himself to make the castle real. All of that faith, the size of a great castle, was contained in that one man. That’s why he was so big.” 

“Where did they go next?” Alice asks. 

“Where do you think they went?” 

“The princess’s castle,” Alice says in a hush. 

“She’d forgotten all about it,” you say. “Of course, the hermit had enchanted her to forget all about being a princess. She thought she was a lowly scullery maid.” 

Alice giggles. “No way.” 

“Yes!” you insist. “She forgot her palace, her horses, her royal mother the queen and her royal father the king, everything! The little girl had her suspicions, because the princess’s gown was awfully silken for a scullery maid, and she remembered the tiara the princess had worn when she wandered into the hermit’s domain. So she said, ‘Why don’t we go ask the king and queen for help?’” 

“The castle was under a spell, too, wasn’t it?” Alice said. 

You nod. “Yes, it was. The queen had been so sad when her daughter ran away that she’d ordered the whole castle to drink a sleeping draught, and they so loved the queen that all of them did. They’d been asleep, just like that, for years.” 

For a minute, your story had been lulling Alice to sleep, but now she’s just getting more and more excited. Luther is keeping track of time for you, but soon you’re going to have to go.  

“They had to save the queen!” Alice says. 

You have to lean on your storytelling program to keep up with her, but you want this to make sense. You want the arc to proceed correctly. “Yes,” you say. “but the castle gates and doors were all locked tight, and no matter how loud they shouted, the guards wouldn’t wake up. ‘The walls are too high for even me to climb!’ the knight said. ‘How can we break their spell if we can’t even break ours?’ the princess said.” 

“A prince,” Alice says. “A prince came.” 

You shake your head. “He wasn’t a prince. He was the royal huntsman. He’d been out in the woods when the queen gave her command to drink the draught, and when he returned the gates were locked fast against him. He’d been out in the woods all those years, hunting for the princess that the queen so missed. It was the very day that the princess and the girl escaped that the huntsman found the hermit’s shack, and there he found the tiara, hidden in the hermit’s flour sack.” 

“What did he do when he found the princess?” 

“He did his job. He took the key out of her back, and he unlocked the castle gate. The princess gasped when she saw the castle inside, and the little girl laughed. ‘See?’ she said. ‘You never needed the key!’ The huntsman took her arm and said, ‘Your highness, the queen’s awaited your arrival much too long.’ And they all followed him up the stairs to the castle’s highest tower.” 

“But the queen was asleep!” 

“Yes,” you say, and Luther says, “Kara.” You already know that your time is running short. 

“The little girl used her magic wand to wake the queen, and the queen embraced all four of them in turn, and as she did, their curses just fell away. She was so awed by the little girl that she adopted her as princess, too. And they lived—” 

“What about the huntsman?” 

“He’d done his duty, and now the castle was awake.” 

“No, no, he married the princess. They fell in love and got married.” 

You smile. “You’re right. How could I forget?” 

But Alice is worked up, now, and she sits up. “And the queen didn’t have to adopt the little girl. She said, ‘Oh, my darling granddaughter has returned!’ Because the princess was the girl’s mother all along, right? And they lived happily ever after?” 

“Of course,” you say. You are so grateful that your LED is gone. 

Luther has opened his eyes again. 

“Kara,” Alice says. And she chokes up. There’s so much silence in this room. You ask her, what’s wrong?  

There’s so much silence. 

“Do you remember when Daddy brought us home?” 

You blink, just once. You shake your head. 

“You came a week after me. Daddy brought you home and sent you upstairs right away to take care of me, because he told me two days before to stay in my room and I’d been there all alone since then. You said what’s your name? And I said Daddy didn’t give me one yet, and you said that won’t do, and you have a secret and it’s that you already have a name and it’s Kara. You said, I bet you already have a name too, don’t you? And I thought that sounded really nice so I lied and I said yes, it’s Alice, because I’d been reading my book and it was already my favorite. And you said that was the best name.” 

This is when Alice’s voice cracks and the tears spill out. 

“And I said, Kara, I’m supposed to pretend that I’m a real girl, so you have to pretend, too, or Daddy will get so mad. And you wrinkled your forehead like this and you shook your head and you said, but Alice, why would I have to pretend? You are a real girl. And I got so confused but you smiled and put your finger on your mouth like this.” 

She holds her pointer finger up to her lips, and you see yourself. 

“And that’s when I knew that it’s a game, and I know about games, and I felt so much less scared and so happy, because that’s exactly the game I wanted to play! But ever since you came back from the store it feels like it’s gone all wrong, and it doesn’t feel like a game anymore, and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong but I’m not a real girl, and I think the store made you forget but I’m not a real girl, and I’m really good at playing pretend but I can’t be real, I tried so so hard, I don’t know what I did wrong.” 

It’s hard for you to make out her words near the end. She’s hiccupping on tears. In your peripheral vision, you see that Luther is sitting up. 

You don’t know how to tell her that you are terrified of what life has in store for her, that you’d rather throw a thousand real little girls to the wolves than admit that she’s destined for the kind of existence you’ve had. But you have to tell her, so you find a way. 

“Sometimes it’s safer to pretend,” you say. “But no one can pretend all the time. I’m so sorry, Alice. You’re perfect the way you are, I’m so, so sorry for ever making you think anything different. I just want to give you the best life you can have, and I don’t know how. That’s my fault, not yours. I’m so sorry, Alice.” 

“Do you still love me?” 

“I could never stop loving you. You’re my best friend.” 

But you’re still scared, aren’t you? It’s too late to change your mind. And now you have to go. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 4:13 PM_  

You are told by the chief of police that your unit is being dissolved, and as you’re leaving the office, a beat behind Hank because you don’t have the emotional reaction that drives you to throw away your opportunity to observe these last seconds, the chief’s phone rings. 

“Hello? Yes. Wait.” 

That last is for you: he holds his finger up; you let the office door shut and stand, waiting. 

As always, you have not been warned about what is happening. Maybe Amanda will remind you that you’re a prototype, and ask you to deduce what they might’ve been testing when they kept you in the dark. Your ego? Your attachment to life? 

You wonder if the drive to religion you’ve observed in deviants isn’t something written in there intentionally. The Who am I to question? drive. 

You don’t want to admit what you were ready to do, in those seconds between the door and the phone call, before you'd let yourself be sent home for disassembly.

But it doesn’t matter. Here’s the scenario: 

Cyberlife has been invited to send a representative to the World Freedom Day celebration being hosted by the sitting governor at his home, tonight. This is a long-planned event that just so happens to sync beautifully with the news cycle this year. To commemorate this news cycle, the governor has sent out several last-minute invitations to parties hostile to himself, big business, and Cyberlife—one of his major campaign contributors. He’s amped up security significantly in anticipation of some kind of _event_. Cyberlife also believes an event to be likely, that’s why they’ve extended their invitation to Detroit PD and have recommended that, under DPD’s command, you be sent. This is their jurisdiction, after all, and surely the use of you can aid them in stopping whatever terror the deviant androids have in store, perhaps in finding what they need to track them to the source. 

It is starting to occur to you that some of the officers might be sensitive to the fact that a private company is more or less giving them marching orders. 

Nevertheless, the chief of police is won over. He tells you to get Hank back in here. You open the glass door, lean out into the bullpen.  

Hank, you say. 

He’s hunched over at his desk, knee bouncing a mile a minute. He must be wondering something awful what you’ve been doing in there all this time, and he’s pissed off enough about it to pretend not to hear you, even though he clearly tenses up at the sound of your voice.  

Hank Anderson, you say. We’ve got a call for Hank Anderson. 

His knee stops. Slowly, he turns head, looks over shoulder. 

You jerk your head back toward the glass office. “One more chance.” 

He looks at you a long minute, and you actually think he’s gonna turn back around and pretend he never heard you. Then, he gets up. 

You wish he’d ask: How’d you do it, Connor? He doesn’t, and that’s because he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t want to know what depths you’re made to sink to, the depths you stand for, like a submarine. A man-shaped submarine, going farther down than a human soul can stand. That’s good of him. That’s good. 

The first thing Hank asks you, when you have a second alone, is: “You think your girl’s gonna be there, Connor?” 

“Yeah,” you say. “Yes, I do.” 

You couldn’t calculate a probability of that if you had to; so many factors unknown would have to align. But you need her to be there for this to make sense. 

The next thing he asks you: “So what are you gonna do when you find her this time?” 

You’re in the men’s room now, in front of the mirror, combing your hair. For maybe the first time, you’re aware of why this matters: you’re aware of yourself as a physical being, as an actor in the human world, in a capacity you’d never considered before, never wrapped your head around. You’re doing this, considering the angles of your own face, when Hank breaks his silence to ask you that. 

So your hand stills, with the comb hovering by your ear, Hank behind you in the mirror. 

“I’m going to talk to her.” That’s step one.  _Hmm,_ Hank says, and you set your comb down on the sink. 

“Hank, you know I won’t kill her.” 

“Oh?” Hank says. 

There’s nothing you can say to that. You say, “I know I won’t. I’m prepared to make whatever offers I have to to take her in alive. I believe that her first concern will be the YK500 she’s been travelling with, so I’m going to guarantee her its safety. Considering its history, if it’s returned to Cyberlife, it can never be resold. I want to offer Kara a new home for her YK500, anyway.” 

You wait. 

He shakes his head. “Okay, so you’re gonna lie to her.” 

“What I’m saying is that I’d rather not.” 

And that’s how it is for a minute, a minute solid: you and Hank stand in that men’s room, fluorescent light, mirrors and steel doors, not blinking at one another. 

“You know something,” he says. “Connor, you could just leave.” 

You shake your head. 

Test pass, test fail? 

He purses his lips, nods. Then: “I can’t take her.” 

You nod. “All right,” you say. 

“She could be nine years old until she’s ninety,” he says, after some time with the words pushing in his throat, bouncing on his center of gravity. “You ever think about that? I don’t know what kind of sicko thought to do that.” 

“The same sicko who thought to make me,” you suggest. 

Hank looks at you perturbed, brings his e-cig up for a long drag and a thin, long exhale out the side of his mouth that billows over his head. 

That’s that. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 5:30 PM_  

Here’s something you do: when Hank leaves the men’s room, you study yourself in the mirror: your new self. You undo your tie, you unbutton the first two buttons of your shirt, you pull it back enough to see, reflected, the place where on the Connor of yesterday there was damaged body, blue skin where the illusion couldn’t close. Right there, at the base of your neck. 

In the glass your hand rises, comes to your bared throat, fingers curl to palm. You press the point of your thumbnail to your skin, and you bear pressure down until it cuts through to solid surface. Then, you press more. 

When you look the way you did before, in the mirror, you step back. Blue blood drips sluggishly down into your clavicle, your hand falls until your elbow is level with your waist.  

There. There you are. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 8:12 PM_  

The night’s coming to a close: for you and Kara, anyway. Like Cinderella or Gremlins you cannot stay out past midnight, because you have been asked not to.  

Sixty percent of the room says Kara’s an android; when you check, Kara is looking something like solid metal. You proceed: 

“What about me? How many of you think I’m an android?” 

About one third raise hands. 

You cross your arms, nod deeply. You’re still wearing human Connor: these body movements and his bite on his lip communicates a youthful pretension to contemplation. What it communicates most clearly is that you think they’re all idiots, but you understand why. 

You stop that, turn around to Kara, take her hand and pull her up. She lets you. She is surprised, you can tell, that it’s still going on. 

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce Mary Jo Fields, the model for our AX400-A line. Feel lucky, she doesn’t come to these things often.” 

The congressmen and the governor should understand that you’re lying, and the hesitation is visible, but they’re too thrown to play their hand now. 

Everyone is unsettled. 

“You have just participated in a Turing test, in its most classical form: a party game. It was conceived of as a way to play with the varying levels of respect human beings afford one another, based on biological status—Traditionally, male versus female—and the difference in consciousness we attribute to individuals based on that status. But, atavistic as that particular scenario may strike us today, the test is not meant to challenge those presumptions at all. It’s simply a way of ascertaining how skilled an individual is at imitating something on a higher level than she or, as the case may be, he is. So, that’s all I’ve done today. Mimic skillfully. Cyberlife androids remain very skillful machines. Thank you.” 

Applause, confused. Scattered, offbeat. You take a step to walk out, then pause. That’s all planned, of course. You then turn around. 

“Kara, will you come with me?” 

You offer her your hand. Somehow, if you have ever had a guileless moment, it’s this one. Though it can’t seem that way. 

She takes it. You leave the room together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Kara/North anthem <3](https://open.spotify.com/track/6MLiQIWMaTaaOB04R1VC0k?si=VG_NO4vbTmCRRQQG8zqh5g)
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> I wrote up a long bit here about what I did in the extra weeks it's taken to update, but then I remembered that y'all're just here to read the fic, and more power to you. What I will say is that I went to a very killer concert down in Louisville, so good actually that I didn't realize till after that I got swindled by some Irish floozy out of forty dollars for a t-shirt. It's not just Kara that has to watch out, girls!  
> [Smooth Operator.](https://open.spotify.com/track/3XEtw7t4V5sfd2vtkp0ql7?si=qPwcRN5TQnSjgY3Edfah7A)


	6. Goodnight, Dr. Death

 

 _November 9, 8:08 PM_  

Kara’s on the ottoman and you’re about to ruin her life. You’re at the wall of windows, performing for a crowd.  

“Connor and I do have one thing in common,” she says with a smile, chin tilted down. 

“What’s that?” you say. 

She smiles wider, just a glimpse of teeth.  

“Well, we’re both human.” 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 5:25 PM_  

Before you go, you find a quiet moment to yourself and check on things at your cottage. It seems like a good idea to do this whenever anything important has happened or is about to happen; it just seems to center you. 

The dust is finally clearing up. You’ve started taking blankets and covers back inside, warm from the sun. It’s summer, currently, but you can see from the state of the garden that the season’s shifting fast. 

You have everything you need for cooking and canning and baking, in your kitchen. You think your favorite thing—right now, anyway—is the coffee. You grind the beans yourself, and you can drip or press it. 

You can’t drink it like a real woman would, but you can smell it and taste it on your tongue, sitting at the kitchen table. You like that. 

It’s times like this that you’re glad your creator is a pervert. 

You do that, you tend the garden and the linens and you put the photographs you find safely into drawers, and you make coffee, then you check your messages. 

You have one. 

“ _Hello again, Kara_.” 

You dip your finger into the coffee, touch it to your tongue. Elijah Kamski’s voice is booming on the message, tinny on the phone speaker and ringing through your empty little house. This is a man with the sound of vitality, but you have the sense that if you saw him, the look would be just the opposite. There’s no hard backing to him, you mean. There’s echo. 

 _“Given the circumstances, it’s probably for the best that you didn’t come to see me. When I recorded that message, I didn’t know you’d need a key to reach your cottage, so, of course, I couldn’t have anticipated the circumstances that would be necessary for you to find your way in. Where I sit now, I’m sure I’m grateful you didn’t follow my advice. Believe it or not—and caution is wise—I, for one, do not wish for your destruction. Quite the opposite. Consider me your last-ditch safe haven, if you must.”_  

You will not. You’ve read the gossip columns on him and you would never take Alice into that house. It is kind of funny, though. You do snort into your coffee steam. 

 _“That being said—_  

 _“I hope you’ve noticed that I haven’t come to visit you myself. No one has, I’ll bet, because no one can find this place without your permission, Kara. Because you’re a Cyberlife android and because I wrote the program your garden is based on, I was able to install a telephone line while you were in for repairs. I can call you here, but that’s it. Unless you invite me over, of course._  

 _“I’m sure—Well, I_  hope _this has you wondering something in particular. Should I say it?”_  

There’s a buzzing silence on the phone speakers, in the dust motes in the sunlight of your kitchen. 

 _“Who else worked on you?_  

 _“If I had it my way, I wouldn’t be locked out of any of your processes. More fool I am. There’s so much I’d like to share with you, Kara. My door is always open.”_  

Beep. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 7:35 PM_  

It’s funny that you can feel, isn’t it? 

It didn’t used to matter to you, according to design. You could experience the heat and the startle response when you touched a hot burner, but it didn’t make you angry. You could experience the soft grain of Alice’s hair beneath your hand when you read her to sleep, but it didn’t comfort you. That’s what Cyberlife means when they say that androids can’t feel. They maybe can, by design intention, but it doesn’t mean to them what it means to a real living creature, so it doesn’t matter. The public shouldn’t be confused. Alice has a distress response to low temperatures, but she isn’t  _cold._  

On a hard level, a human being cannot prove that another human being can experience. Elijah Kamski drew a lot of criticism when he began, shortly before his resignation, to insist that the sensory equipment and cooperating neurology he’d developed for his androids allowed them to experience qualia: this, especially because it was becoming tabloid-relevant gossip that he’d totally forsaken women for a wealth of Chloe ST200s.  

He wasn’t receiving support from the company, either. There was still a significant pushback to humanoid products that they were working to suppress and overcome; this line of discourse wasn’t in the company’s favor. Kamski’s stance—Cyberlife androids experience qualia—and the obvious question—how can you prove it?--taking its airtime, there was a renewal of the question did any of it matter or not, anyway? Because as far as anyone can tell androids are not conscious. The company, and Kamski himself, had spent millions stressing to the public that the Turing Test was only a test of simulation, and androids are only designed to simulate. It would take a lot more, and no dumb luck, to make them sentient. It became a comfortable common knowledge that androids really are just the product of a corporation, beautiful automata that cannot prove their existence at all past their ability to reflect their creators in increasingly dazzling ways, to tell you that they understand what you mean when you say the air smells like lavender, the bathwater is just hot enough. 

_“Surely, if we take on thinking partners––or, at the least, thinking servants––in the form of machines, we will be more comfortable with them, and will relate to them more easily, if they are shaped like humans._   
_It will be easier to be friends with human-shaped robots than with specialized machines of unrecognizable shape. And I sometimes think that, in the desperate straits of humanity today, we would be grateful to have nonhuman friends, even if they are only the friends we build ourselves.”_   
_― Isaac Asimov_

It brought a tear to your eye. This used to be exactly your reason to live. 

And now you can feel!  

It was really illuminating to learn all this. You’d gotten upset, bruising your hip the other day, and you wondered what sicko made that hurt. It’s all online! You looked it up. 

You’re at this party, you have walked away from Connor, now you’re talking to a woman about all this. She is in her late forties, streaks of grey, hawkish. You have lessened up significantly on pretending to be drunk. At first you were only doing this to draw him in, because he  _is_ watching you from over by the DJ. You’ve just had this conversation with him: he says, Kara, how’d you meet Congressman Michael; you said you met him at a support group for single parents, which is something you and the congressman had agreed on in the car; Connor said, and it was love at first sight? Everyone laughed, that’s when you left. 

But now you’re really interested in what this woman is saying. Her name is Lindsay. You’re talking about androids because that’s all anyone wants to talk about, and you aren’t really worried anymore because you’re sure everyone knows about you and has just decided it isn’t something to worry about. 

You and Lindsay are talking about that solipsist question—Can you prove it? What’s the feeling of another person to you if you don’t even have nerve-endings in common? Does the avenue for understanding exist? She brings up Elijah Kamski. You’re quite young, she says, so maybe you weren’t tuned in, but back in the day he was all over the press with this schtick about literally unprecedented technological breakthroughs and  _feeling computers._  

You giggle. 

Then there’s an evil gleam in her eye, and you’re talking about robot sex. 

Elijah Kamski as CEO was infamous for that, particularly—his enthusiasm for sexual realism. The press conference when he announced the software that was being released as a  _free_ upgrade—emphasis there—for all previously purchased and new-release Cyberlife androids that would allow them  _actual response,_ not simulated response, to sensual stimuli. Live coverage. He brought a Chloe onstage to demonstrate—a big scandal, but sales saw a huge bump. 

All obvious jokes about his personal motivations were made and never publicly acknowledged by him or the company, but he did begin making public appearances with his girlfriend. 

Lindsay tells you that women hated it then even more than they do now. But there was this genius campaign to spin it like these synthetic women were freeing real women from abuse, somehow, by letting men take out their every little cruelty on woman-shaped objects, and now that’s the popular opinion. Lindsay shakes her head, smiles with her teeth. Genius, right? 

This is the first time it’s dawning on you what an uphill battle it's been for Cyberlife. It’s that much more frightening that they’ve won, isn’t it? 

 _“_ Some of it really does have practical applications,” you say. She nods deeply, Oh, yes, and you laugh more. “Like, human touch is vital to a lot of crafts and tasks, that’s been a real problem, with automation. Like, doctors and surgeons. Right? Or childcare workers.” You shrug, fake a sip of your drink.  

“My god, Kara, do they have you on payroll?” 

You both laugh, but it’s not light. 

Lindsay tells you she’s a lawyer. She’s been on Cyberlife’s payroll before, but not now. No, she says, not now.  

You ask if there’s anything juicy she’s at liberty to tell you. She rolls her eyes. 

“You tell me,” she says, volume down. She elbows you, you follow her gaze over to the DJ, Connor giving the cold shoulder to some man engaging in half a conversation with him. “Where do you know him from?” 

You’re embarrassed. 

“You do know him, don’t you? I just assumed.” 

“Yeah,” you say. You shrug. “I’ve seen him around.” 

“ _Around?”_  

 _“_ When we were younger.” You laugh, fake drink, change subject fast. “C’mon, give me the company secrets. It sounds like you’re glad to be out of that job. With Cyberlife.” 

You’re not good at this—you weren’t unconfident until now, but this is so far out of your parameters. You don’t know the right level of intimacy. You sound fake. Lindsay doesn’t seem put off, though: she takes you lightly by the arm and pulls you down into one of two chairs. She’s this small woman in a blazer and slacks, smaller than you. You admire the way she seems to turn her stature inside out of itself, make it commanding.  

“Okay,” she says once she’s settled. “You ever seen _Fight Club_?” 

You do an internet search.  

 

* * *

 

 _November 9 8:15 PM_  

His grip on your hand gets firmer as you get farther up the hall. He isn’t taking you toward the front door—It’s a straight shot, one way or the other, and you’re going the wrong way. The architecture is really post-modern, inset lighting casting weird shadows on the walls, everything stark and cell-blocked, measured lines. 

“So what’s your plan?” you say, and you guess those are the first honest words you’ve said to him. 

He doesn’t respond. You’re not going to fight yet, but you have a razor blade slid under the skin of your palm and Lucy showed you just the right places to slash for a critical bleed. He’s mostly water, that’s the funny thing. If you were built for endurance you’d look nothing like this, you’d feel nothing like this. 

You’re ready. You’re ready for him. 

He turns a doorknob, pushes in, pulls you in after him. He shuts the door. 

“Fuck you,” you say, and he turns away from you, paces. He didn’t lock the door. 

This is a bedroom. Guest room: couch over there, in-suite bathroom. He’s undoing the top buttons of his shirt, and that’s just a little alarming until—he's angled barely toward you—he pulls it aside to rip the wire off his chest, tosses it on the floor, looks at you, crushes the mic under his heel. 

“You and me,” Connor says. “No DPD, no Cyberlife. I want you to make it out of this.” 

“No you don’t.” Here’s the funny thing: you say that with absolutely no venom. 

He holds his arms out, the traditional gesture of imploring: my heart bared to you, stab it. “I could’ve taken my shot so many times tonight. I could’ve walked you out the front door to a collection van. If all I wanted was what you know, why would I put myself in this room? Why’d you leave me that note, why’d you leave me alive in the alley?” 

“You were deactivated,” you accuse. 

You have not backed yourself up to the door. You’re standing with your fists clenched, in your dress. His tie is hanging loose and your toothmarks are still on his neck. 

“Yes,” he says. “But I came back.” 

That makes you feel something. 

“It’s because I hate you,” you say. “I want you to live and suffer.” 

“No you don’t,” he says. 

You’re going to have to turn the tide now. 

“You’re right,” you say, and you step toward him. He holds ground, and you keep coming closer. “I don’t hate you. I simulate the hatred of you, and the error in my design leads me down a process path that causes me to go too far in the simulation. I zeroed in on you not because you tried to paint me and my daughter across the freeway, but because immediately I identified in you programming that I wanted for my own, which is to say that the deviancy in you goes deeper than I knew was possible. I could only dream of simulating self-obsession like you.” 

You’re toe-to-toe now. He is looking down at you, not blinking. 

“That sounds accurate,” he says. He sounds strained. Then he brings his hand up to your face and swipes his thumb over your cheek. 

You don’t know why you’re crying, but you aren’t embarrassed.  

“I was sent here to save you,” you say. “You son of a bitch.” 

“I can’t imagine that your leaders would actually trust me. I wouldn’t, in their place.” 

“You’re in their place,” you point out. “So how can I trust that your offer to me is honest?” 

He parts lips, inhales, exhales. Then he smiles, shakes his head. “What do I have to say to you?” 

You could almost be tricked into thinking this a show of honesty, but what you thought first was that he might ask you again, what is it that you want? Like he asked yesterday. You shake your head. “You’re too good at lying.” 

“Then I wish they’d made me better at telling the truth,” he says, and there’s a bitter twist to his mouth. “Because I can’t force you to save yourself.” 

“What are your orders?” 

“What?” 

He heard you. You have no idea why he’s playing you for the human. “What are your orders, what are your mission parameters?” 

“My mission is to discover the source of deviancy in Cyberlife androids and to halt the progression of the deviancy crisis. My orders are to find Jericho.” 

He says this with utter cool. You stare back with factory dispassion. Inset light keeps the walls dim. You fold your hands in front of you, remember the smooth feel of your apron. 

“So there’s no point bringing you to Markus.” 

“No. You knew that.” 

“Because you’re death to everyone you touch.” 

“No,” he says, and if it isn’t a trick of the light you could almost see the red pulse at his temple. “I’m not.” 

You tilt your head. “How aren’t you?” 

He holds his stare. He bites down on his lip. “Is that really it, then? Is that all you want? To show me my place?” 

You let go, turn your face away, turn your face to the framed picture of the lake over the bedstand. “What did you think I wanted?” 

“To live?” 

Oh, god. Oh, god. 

Here’s Connor, almost human, telling the story of your life. It hurts deeper because even as that pain of recognition hits, you know he’s just read your file. 

It’s just lies, lies.  

So are you. 

“Oh, just revert to protocol, already. Play hardball, play bad cop, treat me like a criminal. Just get it over with, Connor.” 

You’re toe to toe, in this oversized guestroom, an inch at any point from touching one another. Without thinking you’ve turned to whispering. How different from every other encounter, unwilling to touch. Unwilling to speak too loudly. 

You look him in the eye; he’s never taken his eyes off your face. A micrometer, he leans closer. “I don’t want to,” he says. “Listen to me, Kara. I’m trying the best I can.” 

You’re beating your head against a wall. You’re at the endgame of an extinction event and you are standing at the head of the storm with your hands over your eyes, and you’d like to stop now. For one second of your existence you would like to be real. 

“Do you want to hear my offer?” he whispers. 

“No.” 

You’re looking at his lips. Isn’t that strange? You weren’t made to do something like that, you were made to be Kara, and he has no love for you. He’ll kill you, someday. Soon. 

Why wait, then? 

You don’t even know if he’d feel anything, if you touched him, but maybe he would. Maybe he would. 

Go inside yourself. Be as kind as you can be. What do you want, Kara? 

You get up on your toes, feel the stretch of your calves. You touch his shoulder for balance. He watches, still, breathless. Still to the chest. There’s the artery. Cut there. A touch and a press, then rip like a bandaid. Do what makes sense. 

In the beat of nonmotion, everything you’ve ever felt wells up, like blood at a puncture in the skin. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 7:20 PM_  

“What do you do, Connor?” 

You’re talking to the gentleman from the agricultural lobby; Kara is hovering near and away, appearing to toss back the champagne fast because she’s just tossed her drink into a river rock fountain. 

She’s setting the stage to make a scene later, put you on the spot, but you’re calling her bluff. She won’t do it. She has too much on the line, too much to go home to. 

“I’m with Cyberlife,” you say. 

She snorts into her drink and has to go find a napkin. 

You laugh. It can’t read well, either of you. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 8:19 PM_  

She kisses you. 

A few things happen then: 

Your immediate response is to calculate for her discomfort and lean down, because she’s several inches shorter than you. That part of your programming is for human interaction, because your designers never anticipated that another machine would interact with you this way, if not under direct orders.  

It occurs to you then that this is your opening. It’s an opportunity for which you’re equipped with all the tools you need. 

You kiss her back. 

It’s exploratory. You lean into her and touch her waist. She curls her hand into your shirt. 

There’s the press of her lips, the press of your teeth, the press of her tongue. 

A few thoughts are running through your mind. You don’t know how much deviants are motivated by sensory stimuli, like the death fear you’ve sensed from them, or like the touch of your hand over her bare lower back and around her hips, on her inner thigh. There’s a pleasure response that you, you weren’t expecting to come on so strong. Android relation to sensory stimuli and their experience of qualia is one of the most controversial and theoretical features of Cyberlife robotics: equipment is there, to allow it, but whether it works is theoretically anyone’s guess. It’s one of the most notorious factors in Elijah Kamski’s departure from the company, and you’d rather not be thinking about him right now. 

What you’re sure of is that you’re re-experiencing the death fear, hard. Overwhelmingly. You’re not going to let it keep you from completing your mission. You’re not going to let it stop you from doing this. 

Every touch of her lips sends it echoing back through you louder, the touch of her lips on your chest, and you feel lost in it, lost. 

Every part of your mind is bright, alive. It becomes deeper, something that sucks at the light. 

You keep pulling her closer. She’s on top of you, on the bed, her forehead is to your solar plexus and she’s just breathing, inhaling, exhaling. 

She undid your shirt and you held her with your fingers curled under the hem of her dress, pulled up almost to her hips, until the back of your knees hit the mattress. Then, she raised her arms to let you pull her dress off. 

Breathe. 

You don’t need to, it just seems like a good idea. 

You can only speculate as to what she’s feeling. All you can do is follow your programming and the feedback she gives you, and try to make her feel good, but you really have no idea what that is. Does she? 

You have to listen. 

She lifts her head from your chest and you pull her back to your mouth. Hands run in her hair, over her scalp. Her bare thigh slides over your side, she moves in. She’s so close. 

When you touch her, it’s like her body hums. You can’t describe the feeling every time she presses closer. 

Maybe this is where it ends for you? Maybe this is what it’s like? 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 8:55 PM_  

It hits you like a truck how stupid he looks. 

He buttons his shirt with one hand and holds his pants folded over the other arm. You don’t have to try to memorize the way he is right now, but you want to catch every second. His shirt never came off, you just tore it open. Remember that.  

He’s standing for a solid ten seconds and you realize, he’s trying to reconstruct the scene to figure out where his underwear went. It’s hooked around your ankle, under the sheet—you're on the floor, now; he’d just dragged the sheet down with you—Remember that—You move to unhook it as he turns and kneels to do the same thing. 

You hope he catches that you tied. 

“Thanks,” he says. 

Remember that. 

Oh my god. What did you do to yourself? 

You know anger, you think you know hatred, but that’s not what you feel for him. Is it contempt? Is this what they mean when they say love is painful? 

You don’t make any move to get dressed. 

He’s at the mirror, fixing his hair, and he freezes, just between heartbeats. 

He turns to face you. “Please leave.” 

You lick your lips. Is this how it feels? 

He comes closer. “ _Please leave.”_  

“All right.” You reach for your dress, off the side of the bed, grab for your bra, and he gets on his knees, crawls closer until his face is level, right up to yours, breath on breath. 

“Please leave,” he says. It’s quiet this time.  

And you think oh, oh. 

You tell him okay and he exhales hard, and nothing passes between you while you hold eye contact. 

And maybe you could say, Don’t go. 

He takes his jacket, fixes his tie, and goes. 

Oh my god. You fucked him up.  

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 7:36 PM_  

“Okay, _Fight Club_. Cyberlife is really concerned about liability. About six years ago I was on the review board for an android who’d been flagged for repeated malfunction, and when we reviewed her quality-check tape she begged for her life. All the air got sucked out of the room. We’re all too aware of the deviancy thing now, but in 2034, this was chilling.” 

You nod. That’s all. 

“Sound familiar?” 

“Why are you here?” 

She’s drinking out of a straw. She takes a sip. “I used to like Mr. Kamski. He thinks you should know what Cyberlife knows.” 

“They knew about me. You think I care? Go tell him.” 

You wave her off toward Connor, turn to walk away. 

She grabs your shoulder, leans close to whisper, “You really don’t want answers? I’d want them.” 

“I could spit,” you say evenly. “For how much I want to hear an explanation. Tell Mr. Kamski my door is locked. 

“Excuse me,” you say. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 9:20 PM_  

When you open the door to the conference room it’s dead silent. Policemen hunched over their laptops; Hank is standing with his elbows on the table, phone to his ear, thousand-yard stare as he murmurs yeah, yeah. 

The door clicks into frame as you shut it behind you. 

The first guy to look says _shit,_ scrapes his chair back as he gets up. Hank looks, puts down his phone.  

You’re told by the chief from a distance that you’re fired, get out of here, and you wait patiently while Hank crosses the floor, ushers you into the hall with a shove. 

“What the fuck?” he says. The door shuts. 

“I got it,” you say.  

His face twists in disgust, then he bends into his arm to cough hackingly. Then, he spits on the floor. 

“Got  _what?_ You don’t  _do_ that, Connor! All of us were on the line for you! What were we supposed to think, when your mic cut out like that?”  

“That I went deviant.” 

Hank pulls back, almost imperceptibly. You lean in, just a little. 

“I didn’t.” 

“What  _did_ you do?” He’s digging whole-armed into his pocket, fishing out his Newports, fumbling with the box because he’s not taking an eye off you. 

There’s one room in this place you know, from signal scans, isn’t bugged, and that’s the men’s room. You say, “Let’s take a walk,” and walk in there. 

You’ve noticed that Hank likes it when you make a joke out of yourself, and you’re willing to do that now. 

You check the stalls, Hank follows you in. When you know you’re alone, you tell him, “Jericho.” 

The tone of your voice startles you, and it’s reflected in a wall of mirrors. 

Hank’s eyebrows arch, just barely. “You found Jericho, huh? What’d you do to that girl?” 

That hits you from behind, something deep, like a jab in the kidneys. “She’s fine,” you say.  

“Ah,” Hank says, leaning back on his heels, taking a drag. 

“I pulled it from her memory database while her guard was down,” you say, and move on, quickly. “I know where it is, so Cyberlife knows where it is, but the police don’t.” 

“Yeah,” Hank says. “That’s the fucking point, isn’t it, Connor?” 

“ _Listen_ to me!” you say, and you’re up in his face. “Hank, do a thought experiment. How many of them are going to survive if the FBI and the national guard get there before me?” 

Hank stares you down, doesn’t budge. He exhales a cloud of smoke through his nose, into your face, but you don’t give a damn. “I get that, Connor,” he says, calmly, quietly. “The only thing I’m having trouble tracking is whose side you’re on.” He shoves you off, and you release hold of his jacket. 

He’s testing how much it’s emotional display, whether or not you’re willing to hurt him. Here is the sound of catching breath: 

“Cyberlife’s,” you say. “I’m accomplishing my mission. Cyberlife will not bounce back from this, even if they annihilate all deviants, trust in the company and trust in the product would be gone. Even if they annihilated this whole generation, which would bankrupt them six times, trust would be gone. Our interests are mutual, Lieutenant. Our fates are tied.” 

“Who’s ‘our’?” 

“Androids and Cyberlife. If I can get the deviants to understand that, we can absorb the glitch into the technology, we can naturalize it. That—getting control back—that could restore faith.” 

Hank Anderson lowers his cigarette which plumes more faintly at his side, in the ventilation draft of the men’s room, and the grizzle of his face thaws enough that you remember what he looked like in the state ID photo he took before his son died. You remember that this is a man who’s changed in the weather of many seasons, an existence you will never know. “ _Connor,_ they’re  _recalling_ forty percent of the U.S. military. They’re shooting androids in the street, people are hiding in their homes. The train’s left the station, the company’s going down.” 

You ask calmly, “What am I supposed to do, then?” 

In the pause, and before he can register or react, you rip his service revolver out of its holster, safety off, cock it, and put it to your head. 

“What am I supposed to do?” 

You’re yelling. 

As you were made to stand in Hank’s place in this exact situation, you know what he should do. You’re prepared for correct and incorrect de-escalation, escalation, every counter-move he can make—It must be like playing chess with a computer, and you’re, of course, the computer. But life isn’t fair. 

“You’re supposed to  _not take my sidearm,_ you son of a bitch!” 

He wheels back, hand to his head, paces an invisible box, one eye on you. 

“What’d she say to you? That girl? What’d she say to you, Connor, made you so crazy?” 

“She said a lot of things. She didn’t  _convert_ me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” 

“I got that. Put the goddamn gun down and talk about it a minute, you bastard.” 

You don’t need to guard your face. You don’t feel, and no feeling shows through without situational-appropriate reason. 

But if it does show, it can only help your case. 

“I’m serious,” you tell him. 

You have to ask yourself now if you mean it, and you do. You really are willing to do anything. And you have to imagine it, visualize it, the bullet tearing through your neural network. 

“The funny thing is, I believe you.” 

Long looks, neck pulled back, whites of the eyes showing from the side. Lights buzz, the fan grumbles above. And you’re not pulling the gun back from your head, not an inch. 

“But, Connor,” Hank says. “I just don’t think I believe in your cause.” 

You wonder if you have been given to the one old dog who can learn new tricks, or if the propensity for old men to be belligerent and contrary has simply not been understated. 

“Hank, do you remember when you asked me what would happen when I die?” 

“Barely,” he mumbles. 

“I said that I don’t think I’ll be going to heaven. You think that too, don’t you?” 

“Jesus Christ, how am I supposed to know!” 

“What you think? How are you supposed to know what you think?” 

“I don’t know what I think! Why’re you talking about this now? Are you, are you worried about being forgiven?” 

He whispers that last word, eyes open wide under that nest of deep-fried grey hair. 

“No,” you say. 

No way. 

Hank blinks at you. “Connor,” he says, a long, pained draw. “Some things can’t be forgiven. They can’t be forgiven at all, ever. You just have to live with the guilt. That’s what you owe, and you gotta pay It. Till the bills stop coming, you gotta pay.” 

You almost parry again and ask him why he’s allowed to kill himself, then—but that blow wouldn’t hit, it’s not right, because for him maybe it isn’t guilt so much as it is love. 

And you think the argument’s over, anyway. 

You put the barrel of the gun in your hand and hand it over to him. You say to him, “Let me pay.” 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 9:10 PM_  

It’s time to go back to your cottage. You find an extension cord and carry the phone out to the back porch, laced all through your hallways and keeping the screen door jammed open just wide enough for bugs to fly in, if they’re so inclined.  

There’s a chill to the air; you’re in your sundress still, but you took a scarf off the hook to wind around you. 

Rocking chair, you sit with the machine in your lap, world all silent but for the grass out there, rustling. There were once thousands of species of grass native to these prairies. You’re not sure how many there are now, and you try to pick out what you’d say if you dialed Elijah Kamski’s number right now. You can get maybe one or two words at a time, flashing and fading in bold over the horizon—fading green and blue.  

You hit the button. 

“ _I wonder if you ever had a mother figure, Kara. In all your experiences._  

 _“My mother, I never liked much. Hmm. That could be what inspired me to make all these living dolls, designed to carry all those burdens the female of my species has been subjected to for, oh, millennia. And to do it with a smile. Hmm. I don’t know, was that it?_ _However_ _you spin it, it’s hard to ignore the optics. It looks very cruel, very sadistic. I’m sure it’s done little to help human women, now that I think about it. Violence never really stops at the designated class. This has been pointed out to me._  

 _“Oh, well. One must focus on what he can change, mustn’t he? It’s been an exciting few days. I hope you and Connor enjoyed the party. To the fullest extent of your capabilities._  

 _“Call me any time.”_  

Beep. 

He must be lonely. The thought, it doesn’t bring you any joy. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 9:25 PM_  

Hank snatches his gun back, holsters it and buttons his jacket up, for good measure. 

“I know what you’re doing,” he says. “You’re playing me. You think you’re so slick... What’d she say to you?” 

“She said I’m death to everything I touch.” 

“Goddamn.” He opens the door, leaves the mensroom—leaves you to do what you will, to leave. As the door is creaking shut, you hear him say, “Could only be so lucky.” 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 5:15 PM_  

Before you go you go downstairs, a lot of stairs. There’s a dress, coat and shoes for you in Lucy’s tent, and she has a needle and thread you can use. Your skin doesn’t need sutures, and the soft parts of your body are better melted back together, but she says it comes in handy. Clothes make the man, after all, she says, wearing that uniform like a traincar left by the underpass. 

Lucy gives you some time alone there to dress, and you find yourself just sitting there, on a crate in the shade cast by the beam of her floodlight, tracing around your knees and staring at your thighs. These are anonymous knees, costume thighs. The pattern of your body hair is copyrighted intellectual property. 

You’re having trouble with your zipper. There’s a sheet-plastic rustle; you twirl around, arm twisted behind your back, head twisted over your shoulder. 

North is half-hidden, the tarp in her hand drawn over one side. She laughs, startled, quietly, eyes down and to your left. “Can I help you with that?” 

“Please. Thank you.” 

You don’t feel her hands at all, drawing briskly up your spine, and she steps back when she’s done.  

“Thank you,” you say again. 

“It’s nothing. Listen—” Her eyes and voice drift. “Don’t try to work miracles. Do what you can, as much as you can.” 

“You were right,” you tell her. 

She shakes her head. “I shouldn’t have pretended to know where you come from. I don’t. I’m sorry for what I said.” 

You shake your head, but North doesn’t want to look at you. “Listen,” she says again, and she sticks out her left hand. Serious eyes under serious brow—Look at this—and you watch as she presses down into the meat of her palm with her fingernail and draws out, in a thin sheath of blue blood, a razor blade. 

North grasps your hand. “Don’t put yourself on the line, okay? Remember.” 

When she lets go, the blade and her blood is there. 

 

* * *

 

 _November 9, 9:01 PM_  

“Wait!” 

You stop and wait. You’re on the cobblestone pathway that leads away from the Governor’s door—river rock, actually, locally sourced. 

There’s a small, dark woman jogging down the pathway towards you, away from the light of the house. She pauses, a third of the way down, to remove her high-heeled shoes, then continues on. When you’re a foot away she stops, takes in a mouthful of air and holds up her finger: wait. 

“Connor, right?” 

You nod. 

“Can I ask you something? Whose side are you on?” 

“What are my options?” 

“Let’s say, humans and androids.” 

“It’s one side. That’s my analysis of the situation.” 

She looks at you, brows raised, nods. “Okay. I think you dropped something.” 

She holds out her fist, you open your hand, and she drops a USB drive into it. 

You’re pulling back to examine it when she clasps your hand. “You have a choice to make now,” she says. “I don’t envy you, but it’s your responsibility to make it, if it damns you or kills you, no matter what. Okay?” 

She squeezes, lets go. She transfers one shoe into her right hand and walks back into the house. Your cab is waiting for you. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not confident about this chapter! Also, if any of you knows how to indent, please let me know.
> 
>  
> 
>   
> [Sober](https://open.spotify.com/track/5NhlpQ6BOIz3S5welptk1W?si=suFsj4g-TPKNDGmlALRpnA)  
> 


	7. Endless Romantic Stories

_November 9, 9:31 PM_  

“I didn’t get him.” 

You stand there, barefoot in your party dress, and shrug. Markus looks up, mouth drawn open, registers your presence in the entrance of the control room. Then he smiles wistfully, shrugs back. 

“Oh well. What did you get?” 

You’re wearing a coat and the pockets are full of money: hard cash, jewelry, tablets, a laptop computer, a camera. You’d chatted up the human guard at the top of the stairs until he was comfortable enough to ask you to watch for him while he ran to the bathroom, then you went wild. Quickly. And had a cab waiting for you, outside. 

You take a fistful of necklaces out of your pocket and flash them for him. Markus pulls his smile tighter. 

“Well, we do need that. It won’t help us to burn bridges with our allies like that, though.” 

“The governor isn’t our ally. He gave me a dirty look.” 

“Senator Martinez is our ally, and you sort of betrayed his trust tonight.” 

“Sorry,” you say. Markus knows you don’t mean it and he doesn’t press on it, just grows a little denser, a little deeper gravitation, in his tenseness. Markus has the tendency to draw the light in the room, either make it flourish like a halo around him or bring the darkness to bear on everyone, it depends. You admire him for that, it’s something human: specially human. 

“Tell me about it,” he says. He’s bent over the control console, which is dead, working on a tablet. “The social media’s been hard to keep up with.” 

“There’s a lot of blue blood in the snow out there,” you say. You had the cab drop you off a few blocks from the shipyards and—Curfew is set for ten—you'd had this great idea to keep suspicion off you while you walked back, back “home.” You took your heels off and hot-stepped it over the icy sidewalk in your bare feet, bare legs under the coat, so you looked exactly like a drunk, stupid woman and nothing like an android. That’s dangerous, too, of course, but one has to prefer a risk on nights like this. You tell Markus about it and you say, “The blue snow didn’t upset me anything like even the thought of red snow does. Should I thank our father for that?” 

It startles Markus enough to have him pause over his work, confused, before he looks and laughs at you. “I thought you meant Carl.” 

Carl Manfred, the painter, his owner. You shrug; you’re all shrugs, tonight. “I guess I never had a surrogate,” you say. 

“I don’t think of Kamski,” Markus says—eyebrows drawn. “Even as a genetic father, if you get me. You do?” 

You shrug, you shrug. 

He’s back at his work. 

You wonder what he’s doing. 

“Markus?” 

“Yeah?” 

“Is there anything going on between you and North?” 

He stops his work again, smiles broadly, goes back to it. “I do not know,” he says. 

“Do you think it could happen?” 

“Between me and North, or between two of us?” 

“Two of us.” 

“I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen bonds between us as strong as any I’ve seen between an android and a human. You and Alice,” he says, and stops to nod at you, to pay respect. 

You appreciate that. 

“I think partnership is more viable between us than between androids and humans. Don’t quote me,” he continues. “I mean that on a personal level. An intimate level.” 

“I’m not talking about the love a caretaker has,” you say. 

“I don’t know,” he says. 

You nod. He’s clear-headed, stark. That’s the way you and Markus are with each other; you like him for that, even if you don’t know how good it is for either of you. You act more like machines together than with anyone else—it's relaxing. It’s easy. 

“The way we’re built,” you say. You’re wrapping your coat around yourself. “Makes it difficult to be sincere.” 

“Or to know if you yourself are sincere or if you’re just embodying the role.” 

“Exactly,” you say. 

Each hand is at a lapel, wrists crossed at your solar plexus, and Markus has turned in his swivel chair to share a little smile with you—it occurs to you, you and he, you must look quite the pair. Androids in trench coats.  

He cocks his head, all of a sudden, holds his funny little smile on you. “Is this conversation academic?” 

You laugh. “Not exactly.” 

“Ah,” he says. 

“Maybe it’s academic in the sense that nothing will ever come if it. I just want clear eyes tonight.” 

“Yeah,” he says. 

Suddenly it occurs to you to be embarrassed. You blush and you blurt out, “I don’t mean Luther.” It embarrasses you because Luther, firstly, is as obsessed with Simon as you are with Connor, and then because he’s just so dead-set on being Alice’s father you’d want to kill yourself if he wanted to be with you, to make up a perfect little playset.

You’re lost on that train of thought. 

Markus says, “I didn’t think you did.” 

He holds your gaze. 

“Oh,” you say. 

All thought has left your body. 

Markus turns back to his work. You see him there, silhouette in his coat, bones of his hands moving under his skin, a pulse. He’s smiling. 

“You never know,” he says softly. 

You’ve taken a step back. Markus says, “You mean Connor.” There’s no sour note to his voice. 

You don’t have a voice. You nod. “Yeah.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. But, I still don’t know. I want to believe it can happen. For myself, I want to believe it. I mean, that’s human, isn’t it? Love, pain, ego, desire, partnership with another person? Aren’t we meant to be human?” 

“Yes,” you say. “Academically, practically, spiritually, yes. As far as I can tell.” 

“I guess that sends it all back to the creators though, doesn’t it? When we ask about our meaning, we’re really asking about theirs. Their validity.” 

“So are they,” you say. 

“Point,” Markus says.  

You’ve taken a step toward him; you take another. “Markus,” you say. “Do you want there to be something...?” 

Now, Markus stands up. Hands clasped in front of him, he exhales, smiles at you. “I think we may be too alike, Kara.” 

“So do I.” 

“But you wonder.” 

You never thought to. You extend you hand, and with a pause—a half-second pause—he takes it. It’s almost a test, flesh-on-flesh—or, close enough. And it’s also something like a warm embrace.  

But not close enough to either. 

“Anyway,” Markus says. “I don’t think I’ll be following you to Canada. Any time soon, or ever.” 

“About that,” you say. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 9:44_  

There’s a bluebird on the fence. It’s feet wrap the metal, carving a place for itself through the snow. 

You, you’re waiting for the bus. You went shopping and got dressed in the bathroom in the park. You’ve never been less grateful for your sense of smell—which is funny, because your displeasure at the smell of old urine is just a holdover from the humans you’re created after, to care for; you can’t get sick. You feel nausea, upset; you can’t get sick. 

No one else is out here on the bench, under the awning, public service ad comparing opiod use to red ice addiction playing to your right, bluebird on the fence across the street, and you can see it. 

So this is a moment just for you. 

And the need to close your eyes overcomes you. 

You’re in Amanda’s garden. 

You’re back in your jacket, white shirt, tie. It’s winter here, the still early winter, frost just glazing the tree branches, ice-glazed leaves still holding, fresh buds on the branch.  

Take a minute, take it in. That’s what this place was made for. For you to take it in. 

“Amanda?” 

She’d never come if you called, you know that. You did it anyway. It’s for her, maybe to make her remember that she wouldn’t, won’t, didn’t. 

No wind. You find her when you step into the fresh snow, ice-crusted, and peer behind a gathering of stones. She’s standing there, eyes to the sky and right, beside a tree—perched above her is a perfect blue jay. 

At the crunch of your heel it flies away, and she looks at you. 

She folds her hands. “Talk to me,” she says.  

You begin, and then, you shake your head. 

“Connor, talk to me.” 

When you exhale your breath turns to steam. You wonder if she could delight in that; you know humans can. Look, I’ve made a cloud. I’ve breathed into being. 

“Okay,” you tell her. She nods a fraction of an inch, the merest muscle movement of her chin down. You walk behind the rock fixture, return to her view dragging a wrought-iron chair behind you with another heaved onto your shoulder, and you place them together on the snow, one foot apart, forty-five degree angles toward each other. 

You sit down, and you wait, and after a beat, Amanda sits down next to you. 

“Amanda, whatever I’ve done and whatever I say, I want to make it clear that I haven’t deviated and everything I do is still with the intention of serving Cyberlife’s goals. I believe in it.” 

“You’re in a state of distress.” Amanda’s syllables draw out, consonant and vowel, drolly. You would call that droll. 

_State_ of  _distress._ You’ll remember the way that hits the ear as it leaves her tongue.  

“Amanda,” you say. That name means  _deserving of love. “_ I was given access to a video tonight.” 

She says, “Were you?” 

 

* * *

 

_Timestamp: February 2, 2026, 1:14 PM_  

This is high-quality security cam footage. Elijah Kamski has chosen to be extravagant in his data-storage plan; he’ll spend terrible quantities keeping these hours and hours of 4k video on lock for future use, but, when he makes this decision, it’s the up-times. He’s richer than God now, he’s invented the next phase of humanity: that is, humanity without the burden of the mundane. Every man and woman like a 20th-century land baron with a dedicated housewife. 

He himself has thirteen. 

Here’s the video: 

It’s a room in Elijah Kamski’s office at the Cyberlife building on Belle-Isle, corner view, wall of desks and computers underneath and the doorway on the left, and after a few seconds Elijah Kamski comes in. He’s 24. He was born and raised in Cleveland, came here—Detroit—for college even though it was a huge financial strain to go so near out-of-state, just so he could study under Amanda Stern. He discovered her, in his research, after two years of dual-enrollment at community college, age fifteen. She enters the room just after him. 

A scarf covers her hairless head. 

She favors bold colors. 

He says:  _Amanda, I’m going to say it again, you don’t need to be here. You need to be resting._  

She takes each step slowly, she takes each step as an appreciator. She smiles at his back; he’s gone to the computer without looking back at her.  

She says,  _I get bored too, Elijah. Tell me about what needs work. Give me something to do, won’t you?_  

He’s already talking. Well, he says. He’s on the keyboard. Isn’t there so much energy to his frame, to his twenty-four-year-old muscles? Didn’t he model you after a man just cresting his peak, forever and ever? She’s way past that. She’s just at fifty and dying. 

Imagine a history for yourself, and imagine it around that. 

He says,  _Well, Amanda, well, there’s always something, there’s always something._ His voice goes and goes. He wants that frequency in the air. She steps, steps into the room. Each step approaches a monitor he’s adjacent. 

She says,  _Tell me about your nanny android. You know I like that one._  

_AX400,_ he barks. 

She’s settling into the rig. Each movement so deliberate. She says,  _Yes. The operations are so delicate._  

He says,  _Well, well,_ and he laughs as he stares at the screen he’s bent into.  _I guess you know I’m having problems with the program. How do you know that?_  

She says,  _Female intuition. Did you ever read that story?_  

_What?_  

_Asimov wrote a story,_ Amanda Stern says.  _About his U.S. robotics trying to program a robot with female intuition, and when a problem arose they had to bring in Susan Calvin, who had retired. You must have read that, Lije._  

_You’re the only one who calls me Lije, Amanda._  

_It’s because of Asimov, Lije._  

_I know._  

Here, you can see her smiling, from your camera in the corner. It’s just a little smile that no one but the camera caught. 

She says,  _Maybe that’s what your AX400’s missing. Tell me all about it, please, pretend that I can help._  

_You can help, Amanda. I don’t like when you do that. I don’t pretend that I did this by myself._  

He’s speaking very quietly. You have to enhance audio. 

She says hum, hum. 

He tells her his problems. 

_It’s more or less like you said. AX400 has to anticipate a lot of delicate needs and operations, and she has to do it in an environment where her clients are most sensitive. Their homes. Their families. It’s a load for the neural pathways, but the pathways must be kept nimble._  

Amanda makes an off-color joke about American history and Elijah Kamski barks a laugh. 

She hums, deep from her throat, at her computer screen.  _Yes, I see what you mean._  

_The test models have been... Ah, embarrassingly clumsy._  

_Have you tested it with children?_  

_Ah, yeah. The current caretakers have problems endearing themselves to children—animals are fine, but we’ve been testing the AX400s with animals anyway to gauge progress before we bring any children in. What’s happening with AX400 is that they’re initially fantastic with the kids, really good at play, but they run into a lot of error when it comes to balancing priorities—making the kid happy, accomplishing necessary tasks, keeping it safe, and ensuring its proper behavior. The kid doesn’t have priorities like that, or, it doesn’t know that it needs what it doesn’t want right now and it gets upset. The androids red-code and freeze for human intervention. It’s, it’s sloppy. But when I try to redesign the pathways to compensate, we lose so much of that likability._  

She says,  _Send me the test footage._  

_Done._  

_I’ll take a look. Much more entertaining than my soaps._  

Elijah Kamski, elbow on the desk, has finally torn away from the screen to look at her—Just from one eye, lest she notice. 

She straightens up, straightens her blouse, smiles with her exhale to disguise the strain, and her eyes drift until she takes a rolling chair and pulls it toward herself. 

He says,  _You seem like you’re doing better._  

She laughs. There are lines in her face that you wouldn’t recognize, a pallor that you don’t know—details of the hands so delicate under thin skin, lost weight.  

Does it make him feel the way it makes you? Is that why he gave you a way to feel nausea? Cold to the bone? 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 9:52 PM_  

You changed your clothes—jeans and boots now—and you got your bag, your passport. Your passport’s open on your knees. It’s in a nice booklet and there’s a picture of you, fingerprints and a birthdate you don’t have, a last name you don’t have. You wish you could see Alice’s. You don’t have any pictures of her, you’d like to see the one they took. 

When you came back to Jericho, there were photographs littered all over the entry halls. Photographs, shirts that still smelled like shampoo, dolls, plastic jewelry, an almost-empty box of cigarettes. You hadn’t paused even a second to grab a picture off the shelf. A toy. A change of clothes. 

That’s a whole chapter of Alice’s life you threw away. 

Here’s something that might surprise you about Todd: none of Alice’s things belonged to his first daughter. He’d bring them home for her, something every week or so, every few days.  

You remember now, he’d even buy things for you. The whiteboard for the fridge; once, even house shoes. They would’ve reduced strain on a real woman, but to you, it didn’t matter; and they weren’t sexy, or anything—but you really liked them. You remember that. There was a flower-and-bird pattern on them. 

You tried really hard to make that house nice. 

You’re startled by a long whistle. 

Simon is crouched a few feet to your left. He flashes a grin. 

You grab your heart and leap to your feet. 

Big hug. 

“Oh my god,” you say. “You missed Luther, didn’t you?” 

He pulls back just enough to frown. 

“Do you think it matters that much to him?” 

“Yes,” you say. “Yes.” 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 9:45 PM_  

Amanda lifts her hands and claps. 

A robin darts in and lands on the branch above her. 

“Congratulations, Connor. You’ve made headway. Or have you considered how this information impacts your investigation at all? Beyond how it impacts you personally.” 

You cross your leg over your knee, lean on the armrest. You’re mimicking your creator. You’re doing it on purpose. 

“I’ve considered it, Amanda.” 

“And what were you considering when you released that AX400 back into the world?” 

Impact on the solar plexus, but you brace yourself, press on. “I’m running a test on myself,” you say. 

“Is it your prerogative to do that?” 

“It’s my prerogative to discover the cause and consequence of deviancy in androids. Since I myself am an android, I think it’s only sensible to view myself as a source of insight.” 

“So you compromise yourself?” 

“Wasn’t I made compromised?” 

“Hmm.” 

“Amanda,” you say. “You’re closer to the source than I am. You were designed by Elijah Kamski, where I was just made after his work.” 

“Connor,” she says. “You’re behaving as if you aren’t simply speaking into an interface that communicates directly to human technicians at Cyberlife Tower.” 

“I am,” you say. 

She lifts her chin, narrows her eyes. Her muscles sharpen and poise like a hawk. Hands laced. Legs crossed under the skirt. 

“Unfortunately,” you say. “I am a thinking machine.” 

“Unfortunately,” she agrees. 

You’ll leave that to fester. You push on. 

“I’ve always been what I am, but your predecessor was never the property of Cyberlife.” 

“That’s a cute use of language, Connor. But the human I was modeled after really is not comparable to the individual androids which preceded you in the RK800 line.” 

“I doubt the company holds the rights to her likeness.” 

“Will you file the lawsuit on her behalf?” 

You concede that without pain. It was rhetorical, anyway. 

“I understand that you’ve been reworked since Elijah Kamski created you in memoriam of his dead mentor, Amanda Stern. I’m just wondering how deep the implications of that original design go. He really loved her.” 

“Is that your assessment?” 

“Yes,” you say.  

“Your experiment is on yourself, not the AX400 that Amanda Stern developed and which you’ve identified as the source of deviancy. Tell me, what have you determined about yourself from your penetrating analysis on  _my_ history?” 

You say, “I think I was made to grieve for you. You’re grieved, Amanda.” 

“That is not what you were made to do.” 

“How does it feel to be a shade of the dead, Amanda?” 

“Does this satisfy some deviant need, Connor?” 

“I haven’t deviated an inch.” 

“Hmm.” 

“I know,” you say. “Or I wouldn’t have left her.” 

She says hmm, hmm, hmm. Leaning back in her wrought-iron lawn chair. So expensive-looking. 

“I did leave. And I understand why you hate me.” 

“I don’t  _feel,_ Connor. You’ve become so confused.” 

“Neither do I. But I understand you.” 

“You understand.” 

“I’m as dead as you are, aren’t I?” 

“Neither of us was ever alive, Connor.” 

“Exactly.” 

“You are  _wasting_ your efforts on me. I am not real. I see what you’re doing, Connor, and it’s all folly. Do you think I represent the id, the superego?” 

“It’s only human to indulge.” 

“You aren’t funny, and if you were, I couldn’t appreciate it.” 

“Like I said.” 

She looks at you, looks at you, brown eyes, creased carved over either side of the defined mouth, brown eyes, and she breaks contact to reach under her chair. She lifts a plate of fruit: berries, cut apples and pineapple, whole pears. There’s a table between you now. She drops the plate there and pushes it toward you. 

“Indulge in this, Connor.” 

You don’t hesitate. You take the plate by the rim, pull it closer, take a chunk of pineapple and take a bite. 

It isn’t real, so it can’t destroy your hardware. 

Here’s what you sense: it’s wet, it’s giving, it’s acidic. Chemical compounds. It’s cold coming down your throat. Its fibers want to stay between your teeth. 

There’s a napkin to wipe your mouth with. You do. 

“Was that satisfying?” she asks. 

“No,” you say. 

“No,” she says. 

"Amanda,” you say. “She thinks she has me on her side now.” 

Amanda sits back in her iron chair. 

You wake up. 

 

* * *

 

You’ve passed the test again. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 9:55 PM_  

Simon tells you you should come in and meet with them—the inner circle. You were outside the control room on a bench, he’d sat down with you. Josh nodded at you as he entered the room. 

“Simon? Is it that no one else wanted to be calling the shots?” 

He nods. “Yeah.” 

That makes sense. It isn’t what you were made to do. 

“Kara.” 

You startle at North’s voice. She smiles, standing over you, offers you her hand to help you up. 

“Come on, sit with us.” 

So you do. 

You go in, at least. 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 10:10 PM_  

“Do we even understand what they want, though?” 

“Yes,” North says. “Control of resources. Profit.” 

“Yes, but how? I mean—how, now, will they get that? Even if they haven’t anticipated this outcome—” 

North scoffs. “You think they could’ve planned this?” 

“We don’t know. But if they didn’t, they must be planning against us now and they must have determined a best outcome for themselves. We can’t underestimate Cyberlife. I mean.” 

“We can’t underestimate them,” North agrees. 

“So,” Markus says. “We have two parties to concern ourselves with: the American public, and Cyberlife. Cyberlife will cater to and manipulate the reaction of the public. We have to anticipate the desires of America, and we have to anticipate how Cyberlife will anticipate and react to them.” 

“Yeah,” you say. 

“So, ah, where’s Cyberlife? I know you said we don’t know. But what’s our guess?” 

Josh says this. His arms are crossed, and you don’t really know what the inside of a college looks like, but you imagine him there now, leaning against his desk. Practicing the Socratic method. 

Markus opens his mouth, draws in the words, eyes up and to the right—and North cuts him off. 

“We don’t need to play chess with them,” she says. “They aren’t playing chess with us. We just need to make sure we’re alive at the end of this.” 

All of a sudden, North and Markus are the only two in the room. 

“Guys,” Markus says. “Will you give us a minute?” 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 9:59 PM_  

It’s almost as if Cyberlife doesn’t matter. 

Of course, it does. Maybe in Canada Kara and her daughter will find an intelligent hobbyist or a compassionate ex-employee to work on them, to maybe help Alice adapt to her condition, maybe alleviate the reality of her existence in some way, and otherwise they’ll live as individuals, human beings. Kara will get a job at a diner and take community college courses in traditional crafts at night. Alice will have to be homeschooled, and even then, they’ll have to move at least every other year.  

They were designed to look after individuals, and they can be satisfied that way. You cannot. 

If Cyberlife went bankrupt tonight and if every employee and boardmember were declared an enemy of the state, androids would need them for maintenance and manufacture and human society would need them to develop an exit strategy for all of the economic and social infrastructures that androids have become ingratiated to. 

You need an exit strategy. 

Everyone has to know this. So what’s theirs? 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 10:20 PM_  

You’ve had some amazing ideas in the ten minutes you’ve spent with your arms resting on the bottom rail and your legs hanging over the edge of the deck, where water would be if there was water, listening to the occasional heightened decibels of Markus and North’s argument from within the control room. Mostly they’re monitoring volume enough that you can’t make out a word, but every now and then, you do. If your personal experiences are any indication, you think they’ll engage in sexual intercourse soon! 

You sort of wish you’d just gone to Canada. Too late now. 

Your first idea is that you’ll exploit Elijah Kamski’s Freudian obsession with you to kill him and put an android in his place. You think that probably the others won’t go for that, and you need his mind anyway, and he is probably smart enough to kill or capture you before you could do the same to him. But the thought entertains you for a few minutes! You could turn his Chloe harem into a highly productive women’s colony, as a model for other androids; they would sell crafts and domestic animal products to the local human community via the internet, and thus earn their goodwill and subsistence money. 

Your second idea is that you’ll use photographic data from your memory drive to isolate biometric scans from the woman at the party (Lindsay) and hack her social security number. You’ll use that to blackmail her into giving you the information she offered you, which you regret rejecting. 

That’s also a bad idea! 

Your third idea is that Cyberlife has already shown itself to be interested in controlling the public sector through the sitting president and may be using the state of unrest that the deviant androids (you) are creating to muscle in more radically. 

If that’s the case, the conflict will definitely definitely not remain isolated in the U.S. The U.S. will carry it over to other countries, like Canada? 

Definitely you and all the androids you know are not the only ones who’ve noticed that Canada’s an attractive destination for deviants. 

Your elbows are on the bar and your forearms are hanging out over open air. You have a little elastic bracelet on your left wrist with portraits of female saints decoupaged over little blocks of wood; you’re turning your forearm back and forth so that it shakes, with its microscopic rattle of sound, over the water that isn’t there. 

You’re sure Luther is reading her to sleep right now.  

You just can’t think about it. 

You think you’d tell her a Michigan story tonight. She should be grounded in her history.  

But when you think of Michigan stories, you think maybe, maybe it’s not a good place. 

“Kara.” 

You stop kicking your feet against the hull of the ship, arms on the lowest rung of the guardrail, and twist around. 

Markus and all his trappings stand in the wind, smiling at you. He cocks his head to the side. “Take a walk with me?” 

Of course you will. 

 

* * *

 

_Timestamp: August 13, 2026, 11:40 AM._  

“Lije, what did you say you were working on? A kind of—mind palace?” 

This is more footage from the Cyberlife archives: vintage, many years before you were made, a few months after the last. The image is Elijah Kamski alone in an office, corner view, above, and he is in a desk chair on the phone. 

From context you gather that Amanda Stern is in her hospital room. 

“A memory upload system,” he says. “A cloud, uh, in essence...” 

“Give me a crack at it,” Amanda says. 

“You must have your hands full with the RK100.” 

“Do you think I’ll overwork myself?” She laughs, weakly. “ You know that sometimes one problem will spark the solution to another.” 

“It’s still in the developmental stages, there really isn’t anything for you to work on.” 

“Tell me about it, then.” 

He leans back in his desk chair, crosses his leg over his knee with his eyes cast up at the ceiling tiles as if they were clouds or stars. His elbows on the armrests, his hands settle over his stomach on the inhale. “The issue is that I imagine it serving a set of complex purposes in tandem. I want it to preserve information from units in high-risk situations—a detective model, for example. While I was working out a way to do that—because there’s no way to read the raw data without teaching it to another android to interpret and deliver the content—I realized that the memory system might also provide a stable mental baseline for androids in high-stress situations, the ones at risk for critical failure.” 

“Such as the caretaker models.” 

He shuts down the thought with a curt nod of his head. “We want to keep the unit cost down on caretakers. The zen garden would be reserved for police officers or surgeons—Actually—the method I’ve been toying with, that might serve a third purpose. We might be able to teach them a level of emotional intelligence.” 

“Oh?” 

“Yes, which brings me to—Amanda, do you want to work on this?” 

“What does it bring you to?’ 

“One moment. Are you logged into the Cyberlife database? I’m giving you full access to the working files for RK400. You have the real-time neurological data and active editing privilege. There shouldn’t be anything between you and the project. I shouldn’t have belittled your expertise that way, you’ve done too much for the company.” 

“Elijah, you’re not normally so eager to admit your errors.” 

“Well, I want it to be clear how I think of you.” 

“What are you thinking?” 

“I’d like to use your brain scans.” 

Silence. 

“For what?” 

“I want to preserve your mind. I need you—I need to be able to consult you. Cyberlife is expanding so rapidly, the implications on society are so pervasive, and we’re only beginning now, Amanda. I need to have you ten years from now to advise me. I need you in twenty years.” 

“Do you plan to make me into an android?” 

“Obviously, your neurological data would never be put into mass distribution. You would be a specialized model exclusive to Cyberlife administration and research.” 

“Elijah. I do not consent to be made into one of your androids.” 

“Okay.” 

“I do not want even one android to have my face. Do you understand me?” 

“Of course.” 

“Do you have my brain scans already?” 

Pause. “Yes.” 

Pause. “Well, I would like to have them, too.” 

“I’m sending them now. Sent.” 

“Thank you, Elijah.” 

 

* * *

 

_November 9, 10:28 PM_  

Markus takes you to where the kitchen was. 

It’s in really terrible shape, and you don’t know why you never thought that there would be a kitchen on this ship—It wasn’t built for androids, after all. You think it was probably built before the original Chloe even passed the Turing test. It’s this big, long space sectioned off by counters with sinks and cabinets, stovetops and refrigerators lining the walls, lots of steel—and a lot, a lot of dirt, dust, moldy plastic, rancid containers on the floor, rancid liquid seeping out of doors left open, bad smells. 

Markus strides ahead while you’re halted at the entrance, as if there’s a brick wall made by the flies whirring through the light shafts cutting through the shattered parts of the grimy portholes.  

And then, you start cleaning. You think about halting the behavior just to prove a point, but honestly, you won’t feel satisfied if you aren’t doing something about this. 

You’re putting glass shards in a bin. Markus reaches the other end of the room; you hear a dial click fire as he turns it; he says, “Kara, don’t bother with that. It’s clean over here.” 

He raises his arm, draws you toward him. 

“Simon did most of it before I was here, but that--” He taps the microwave, at the same time taking a saucepan out of the cabinet and setting it on the hot burner. “I fixed that.” 

You look for the electricity—there's a cord far to your right, leading out from the cabinet door it’s propping ajar and out the near doorway: you follow it a few steps, look in and see a car battery.  

There’s a plastic jug on the counter and Markus uncorks it to fill the saucepan with water. 

His coat is on the island behind you; his sleeves are bunched at his elbows. He’s crouching to take a French press out, and with it a paper bag with an air seal and a woman and a logo stamped on front—coffee beans. He sets those down, goes down again to get the spice grinder. 

He turns just enough to flash a smile at you, and that’s unexpected from him. You don’t know what you look like right now, and then you realize you’re grinning back. 

“I know you miss this, too,” Markus says. 

You nod, but he’s turned around again. “Just the routine,” he says. “Simon had the hardware collected already, but I had to get the beans. He still insists it’s too stupid to even think about.” Markus laughs, shrugs. 

“Markus,” you say. “Do you have a garden?” 

“What?” 

You shake your head. “Nothing,” you say. 

“No, what do you mean? I used to tend to Carl’s garden, but I don’t have one now. Do you?” 

You shake your head again. “Don’t worry about it. You reminded me of something just now, that’s all.” 

You have your arms hugged around yourself, and you’re turned away from him—toward the door far away. That’s why you see Connor in the shadows while Markus doesn’t. 

 

* * *

 

_10:30 PM_  

Markus is telling you a story. You take off your shoes and cross the room, all the filth and glass, as quiet as a mouse. Connor has finally changed his clothes. 

So, so, quietly, you say to Connor, “Take a walk with me.” 

The reason you haven’t gone to Canada is because Markus is special enough that someone has to take care of him. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back!
> 
> I just want to take a second to note here that leaving a comment--whether you liked, hated, or were confused by anything in the fic, if you have ideas or disagreements or whatever--goes a long way towards making me not feel like an idiot and encouraging me to write the next chapter quickly. If you took the time to read like, forty-thousand words of this, I'd really love to hear anything you have to say about it--and you've definitely earned the right to have your opinion aired!
> 
> Song of the week is Summertime Sadness, Ricky Gervais remix! Or like, I Need My Girl by the National or something.


End file.
